I'm very new to using divs for positioning - very much a tables guy up to now. But I'm learning - I have a problem now, that putting in a doctype declaration (tried html4 transitional, xml 1 and 1.1) breaks the left div. It's the page in my sig 'map of turkey' if anyone feels like giving me some advice.
Put in xml 1.0 (strict or transitional) and reupload the webpage. You've been designing it in quirks mode so far and infact the doctype is probably correcting the page as to how it should really look.
I tried both strict and transitional xml, but they both break it. What happens is the left div's border stops after about a centimetre.
It fixes it how it should be viewed, it's completely broken at the moment. You've got to use a doctype, otherwise we can't help you add: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> If you are concerned that the page will be viewed 'broken', create another temp page.
This is one CSS newbie trying to help another. I have broken a couple of pages this way. Two thing to check. Make sure the total of your blocks does not exceed the specifified width of the page. Margins must be included in the total figure. You might also be missing a </div> but that usually causes the page to break and display a single column with one div below the other.
Thanks Colbyt, it was a widths/margins issue after all. I had posted a link, by the way Greg (I referred to the 'map of turkey' link in my sig in my first post).