Browser Problems

January 17, 2004 1:51 PM

I asked the first part of this question, to much success, a while ago. I'm setting up a MeFi-type community for the queer community. I've tinkered with my style.css and index template until I came up with the right look. Then I load in Netscape... [more inside]

The problem is that Netscape doesn't seem to recognize the DIV tags. It looks quite sloppy in the ol' standby browser, but in IE it's exactly what I've outputted using my CSS editor and
the adjustments made to the template file. I have no idea
how it loads in Mac, either. What could be happening here and what can an utter PHP/CSS novice like myself do to fix it?

(I'm linking to it not as a self-link intentionally but to open the actually guttyworks of the problem to the experts)

posted by moonbird to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Just checking: You are aware of QueerFilter right? Still, no such thing as too much of a good thing.
posted by fvw at 2:03 PM on January 17, 2004

You're using a doctype of xhtml 1.1 and then sprinkling center and font tags through the page. Gecko (the Netscape renderering engine) doesn't like that. You've also got some mal-formed tags. See here.

Fix these things, then see how you're doing with the CSS.
posted by normy at 2:10 PM on January 17, 2004

on mac: safari, mozilla, and camino have the same errors.
posted by rhyax at 2:16 PM on January 17, 2004

Queerfilter seems to be an aggregator of feeds from the weblogs of GLBT people, and the entries are all over the place in subject matter. A more focused group blog would be entirely different and most welcome.
posted by teg at 2:43 PM on January 17, 2004

I agree, you need to get rid of the errors that are causing your page to not validate as XHTML. Follow the directions you get from the validator's output (linked in normy's post).

Some suggestions:

Tags like <center> and <font> have been deprecated, meaning they don't exist in XHTML and in general shouldn't be used for creating web documents. Avoid them. This is the purpose of CSS. Try using <div align="center"> to center things, and using css to define font properties for different tags.

Nitpick: CSS-based centering is also something that different designers approach from different angles. Here are two.

If the "skeleton" of your page isn't displaying the way you intend, try removing all markup and css that relates to the "glitter" of your page (font styles, colors, etc...) and strip down to just the structure stuff. This will help you narrow down to where your errors are. After you get the structure the way you want, add the fancy stuff.

Remember that most versions of Internet Explorer display the width of boxes (divs) incorrectly. For more info, read up on the CSS Box Model Hack.

Side note: ironically, QueerFilter's layout is also broken in Mozilla.
posted by tomorama at 4:16 PM on January 17, 2004

Hmm, it does appear to be that now. Is my memory abandoning me or did it use to be a real by-itsself-blog a while back>
posted by fvw at 4:44 PM on January 17, 2004

QueerFilter started as a MeFi clone, but then changed to an aggregator.

I've been meaning to do this for some time, just kept getting sidetracked. I think its great it's finally getting set up. (And I even registered a domain to do it.)
posted by benjh at 6:24 AM on January 18, 2004