I hope this is the right place to post this. I've been using XOOPS for about a day, so if this is stupid or obvious, I apologize in advance.

I am putting a site together for a nearby community. I'm using Linux, and was checking the site with Mozilla Firebird, Konqueror, and Galeon. All was well. Then I asked my wife to bring up the site on her Windows box (W2K, IE5). Pure ugliness. Menu fonts are huge. Right block is in the middle of the page without center content. When center content is added, it moves over some, but not far enough. My only other machine is running XP/IE6. Everything looks fine there, except the right block sits in the middle of the page until there is content in the center block. Then everything moves to it's proper place. In my browsers, it's perfect.

Is this a known problem? As much as I hate Windows/IE, I don't have a choice but to make it work, or move on to something that will work with it. I really like XOOPS, and would like to use it if possible.

I am using the default theme. The only modules that I am using at this point are Agenda-X, vlweather(phpWeather), cjaycontent, and mymenu. If you'd like to look at it, the address is http://www.moscowmills.com.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

John

This thread could be of interest for you:

https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=13548&forum=5#forumpost54487

It's a problem with the way IE5 deals with CSS (ie. not very well). Its fairly easy to work around though.

Have a look at this thread, you will also need to refer to the annotated guide to the XOOPs CSS to see where to change things.

Hi John,

Based on my webstats, 95% of my users use IE. But I design and use Mozilla Firebird. So now, when I try to design a theme or change a template, I have no choice but to have both running to see how they render my changes.

Here are some things that might help you:

1. Never let a td be empty. If you don't expect any content for a cell, at least place a non-breaking space (   ). This is especially true for tables using percentage widths. Your home page doesn't have any content, so the center-column is considered 'non-existent' by IE and the right column is 'pulled' to the center.

2. With fonts and borders, do not use relative values (small, thin). Go for absolutes (1px). For fonts, try to use px instead of pt since px is rendered better by both browsers.

3. Use 99.9% as table width. This is something I found here in the forums, but I have not yet encountered any problems with my nested tables that needed the 99.9% width. But this might help solve that 'ugliness' in your front page.

I like Mozilla Firebird, but I have to be realistic with what browsers my members use.

Hope this helps.

Good advice for anyone, thanks kahumbu!