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A problem with tables...

Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 3:14 pm
by tophers
I know - before I get blasted for using Tables (and I've been the one doing the blasting on occasion!), I'm building a page in the CMS that needs to be sent as an email. Since the new office suite for Windows has blown away years of progress, we're back to using tables for layout. And since it doesn't support background images anywhere, I now have a problem.

The page is question is http://www.caplconference.ca/2009/index ... e=updaters

In Firefox, Safari, etc, everything is fine. In IE, however, you'll see the large blue section underneath the Contact Us section. The left-hand bar with News and Contact Us is its own table (in order for the 'ribbon' effect to work). The issue is with the content on the right - when it gets longer than the two rows beside it, it causes them to expand. And it seems to only expand the containing that nav table (at least in IE), not the below it.

Since it has only one column (to hold the table), and can have no background image (thanks Microsoft!), it just expands and shows the background color of that cel (which I've turned florescent for demo purposes - normally it's white, which means I have an unwanted 'notch' in that side of the design.

So my question is - what can I do? How do I force IE to expand the bottom , which is split into columns and does behave properly? The overall height has to be flexible, since the right-hand content will always change. Percent heights only seem to work partially for some browsers (there's a height of 1% set for the table-containing that does the trick for non IE browsers), and not at all in IE. I'm stuck.

Re: A problem with tables...

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:41 am
by Dr.CSS
Try removing the extra from under the , even IE sometimes doesn't like malformed html...

Re: A problem with tables...

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:55 pm
by tophers
Thanks Mark - I really don't know how that crept in - I reused an earlier template I'd built, and it wasn't in the original.

Unfortunately it wasn't the problem (and I was really hoping it was going to be that simple of a mistake!). Anyone have any ideas? Normally I'd change the design to overcome this, but it's based on the design of the main site (which is CSS based, and works fine!).