CSS and absolute positions

[Arne Garvander]

I have an aspx page that use absolute positioning.
Sometimes there is a 15 seconds delay from the time that the text of the
page displayed until all bits and pieces are downloaded to the browser. Until
everthing is down loaded the CSS styles will not br applied and my page looks
very unprofessional for 15 seconds.
I two solutions in mind.
1. Get rid of absolute positions and use tables for positions. The display
will never fail in IE and always fail Firefox and Safari.
2. I most use other features in CSS that I have not yet mastered to make a
cross browser friendly page.
What do you think?

 

[gerry]

How do you figure that tables will 'always fail Firefox and Safari' ??????
I am neither recommending nor discouraging it but tables are by far your
quickest/safest bet for cross browser layout compatibility.

 

[Arne Garvander]

Most of my webpages use tables for positioning. They simply look ugly in
Safari amd Firefox. i.e. https://www.insuranceservicecenter.com/
I have seen tables that look nice in Safari, Firefox amd IE.
I don't know why tables sometimes work fine across browsers and sometimes
they do not.
Do you?
--
Arne Garvander
Certified Geek
Professional Data Dude

How do you figure that tables will 'always fail Firefox and Safari' ??????
I am neither recommending nor discouraging it but tables are by far your
quickest/safest bet for cross browser layout compatibility.

 

[gerry]

you are right , that look pretty bad in FF.
but I don't see what tables has to do with it - there are no tables in that
markup at all.

By a quick look I would say your problem is that you are trying to use both
css and inline styles to position things. plus you are using ms only
ms_positioning attribute. This is most likely due to trying to do
everything wysisyg in the designer which is only a good idea for closed,
intranet, ms-ie-only type sites.

Designing in/for IE is a big mistake.
Waiting until the page is finished before checking it out in various
browsers is a mistake.


Except for a few exceptions, the only html tag attributes you should be
seeing in your generated page are id , name and class.
Remove all of the inline styles.
Remove proprietary attributes.
Empty your stylesheet and start styling from scratch using only the
stylesheet ( no inline styles ) - one style element at a time making sure
that each facet of your styling works acceptably in all target browsers
before moving on to the next element.

Of course you can go old-school and revert to a table based layout which
will immediately take care most of your styling issues ~100% cross-browser.

Most of my webpages use tables for positioning. They simply look ugly in
Safari amd Firefox. i.e. https://www.insuranceservicecenter.com/
I have seen tables that look nice in Safari, Firefox amd IE.
I don't know why tables sometimes work fine across browsers and sometimes
they do not.
Do you?

 

[Arne Garvander]

The following style took care of most of my cross browser problems
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
li {
margin-left: 2em;
}

IE has a default margin that is different from Firefox and Safari.

 

[gerry]

ok , if you say so - have you tried browsing this over the internet ? FF &
Opera are minimally better but still pretty bad.

 

[Arne Garvander]

I have a corporate website. I can not publish at will.
I can only tell what I have found from testing on my private computer.