IE/Firefox viewing problem

I am building a website in Dreamweaver and am having a viewing problem between IE and Firefox. I want the website to look as it does in Firefox, not the way it does in IE. In IE the right table is slid over too far and the whole page is not centered. Anyone have an idea on how to fix this problem...thanks in advance!!!


Here is my site:
www.guitarherogeek.com

 

Try to define the DOCTYPE first and then try to validate it so it can be all browser compliant

Then check your tags again including your CSS

 

use DOCTYPE

 

In a nutshell is that what validate means, when it appears fine in all or most browsers?

 

No, the 'validator' is a program that makes sure that your HTML is VALID. The official W3C online one is here:
http://validator.w3.org/
Passing that means your HTML is actually HTML, VALID HTML. It means all your tags are opened and closed properly. If it doesn't pass that, well, OF COURSE IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK.

Which right now on the page in question lists 39 errors, a hand count by me shows even more. The OP has invalid markup, by all accounts it shouldn't work at all ANYWHERE - the only reason it does is the error correction in browsers is making a feeble attempt at correcting it - the problem is browsers do NOT all handle the same errors the same way, making cross browser nigh impossible with invalid code without hacking it out the yazoo.

The code - it's a train wreck - there is NO REASON to EVER use tables for a SINGLE td... if one only has content for one TD, that's what a DIV is for... I see multiple nested unclassed DIV's that don't seem to serve any purpose, most of those do not appear to be properly closed - NOT that one could tell with the willy-nilly nonsensical indenting. One thing that is quite certain is that if someone is resorting to this: <p>&nbsp;</p> to put spaces between paragraphs, they need to learn what a paragraph is (and what margins/padding are).

As I say WAY too often of late - chuck it all and start over with clean semantic VALID markup, and separation of presentation from content.

Of course, 99.999% of the problem likely lies right here:

and it shows. BADLY.... and people wonder why I badmouth WYSIWYGS. The only thing you can learn from Dreamweaver, frontpage, or any of the rest of those steaming piles of crap is how NOT to design and code a website.

 

Agreed. When looking back to the past, when I knew nothing about coding websites, I'm glad I started to learn by typing in Notepad.

All WYSIWYG apps are imho crap. Dreamviewer is the best from them but it's still crap.

 

Works good for me >_>

 

deathshadow thanks for explaining, a very helpful post.

 

Very helpful, thank you!

 

the reason why there are IE issues is that Microsoft doesn't hold web standards in high regard and only maintains token compliancy with the standards.

I would recommend you get Firefox (gecko rendering engine) Safari (webkit rendering engine), Opera (opera rendering engine) and IE (Trident rendering engine).

There are other browsers out there, but they are either inconsequential or else are different interfaces for the same rendering engines as one of the above (Gecko powers: Firefox, camino, mozilla, netscape and galleon for example)

Best of luck in the future. Long live gecko and webkit!