Re: FN-FORUM: centering in safari2.0

date posted 27th August 2005 19:58

jd wrote:
>
>
> I do not know a lot (or anything) to be honest about CSS (I am a photoshop
> retoucher who dabbles with flash webdesign), there must be some advantage of
> using it, as you lot are always talking about it, however there seems to be
> serious compatability problems using macs particularly using internet
> explorer, someone said here that internet explorer was rarely used on macs
> which is not true - I have worked for 4 advertising agencies - all of which
> used os x and internet explorer
>
> Would this be a fundamental flaw in css compatability or is it simply
> mistakes in the way it is written?
>
> john

Internet Explorer under OS X actually had better support for CSS than IE
on Windows.

With the release of OS X - Tiger Internet Explorer is no longer included
by default.

There are lots of advantages for using CSS, the main one (for me anyway)
is that pages are easier to maintain as your content is kept quite
separate from your styling.

Safari and Firefox both have exellent support for CSS. The fundamental
flaw you speak of is Internet Explorer, which has some major issues with
CSS, which will hopefully be rectified in IE 7 (if it ever arrives).

I'm not sure what IE's coding team were on when they were reading the
CSS standards as some of the past cock-ups have been totally stupid.

The most notable being putting padding on the wrong side of elements.
According to CSS standards then you create a box of a width, say 100px.
Then you define padding for the box of 10px. This means that there is
10px between the edge of the box and any content. The box is STILL 100px
wide thou. But up until IE 6, IE would take this 100px box and add an
extra 10px all the way round resulting in a box that was 120px wide.

Personally when coding web sites I test in Firefox and Safari, make sure
my code is all valid then end up googling to find the hacks to fix it
for IE.

Have a read of http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/ which explains why CSS
should be used and that tables are for tabulated data NOT layout.

Nathan