Problem site:  www.1st-in-scanners.com/indexnew.html

Problem description:  In Netscape 4.5/4.7 the table holding the main
content of the page seems to take on the width of the main table
surrounding the whole page.  I have experimented with this--if I set
the main table to 100% or take the width out the page goes out past
the width of the page so that horizontal scrolling is necessary.  If I
set it to 80%, 20% of the content that was off the page comes back on,
but 60% of it is still off the page.  The page displays perfectly in
Netscape 7, IE 5.5, Opera 7, WebTV, and Lynx.

I have listed the price on this question as $15, I'll tip that much
again to someone who can solve this for me without affecting the
appearance of the pages in other browsers.

Hello eqs,

Netscape 4.X series is notorius for it's ugly table handling. If you
don't close table rows, the HTML processing stops, and the rest of the
site doesn't even get displayed. There is also a known bug where
Netscape 4.7 and below like to make it's own table sizes :-) -

Netscape Bug
http://browsercomparison.esmartweb.com/tablesize/tablesize2.htm#quartersa

With that said - Netscape has an HTML tag all it's own that will work
around your problem. The site will still look the same in I.E. because
the I.E. browser doesn't support the tag and simply skips it. (none of
the others support it as far as I can find)

Change this part of your HTML :


<TABLE CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="1" CELLPADDING="5" ALIGN="left"
WIDTH="80%">
        <TR>
          <TD VALIGN="TOP">
<!-- Begin Main Content -->



To look like this:

<TABLE CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="1" COLS="3" CELLPADDING="5"
ALIGN="left" WIDTH="80%">
        <TR>
          <TD VALIGN="TOP">
<!-- Begin Main Content -->

The added tag is COLS. What it does is force Netscape to 'make'
certain table data (TD) fit within the given criteria. Since we are
assigning a width of 80%, we *created* three virtual columns that
equal a total of 80% of the possible width of the enclosing table.
This forces the table to a set width.

This site explains it far better than I ever could at 1:20am :-). Take
a peek for yourself:

http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/htmlguid/tags9.htm#1480420

You'll need to scroll down a bit to see the reference. I really didn't
use a search strategy, as I remembered having a similar problem with
some of my sites some time ago. To help locate the Netscape table
problem reference I searched for:

netscape 4.7 table width problems
://www.google.com/search?q=netscape+4.7+table+width+problems

Thanks for the great question! If for some strange reason this does
not work for you, please ask for clarification, as I would love to
help further.

SgtCory

---

Clarification of Answer by sgtcory-ga on 14 Nov 2002 08:49 PST

I should have noted that you have the option of using fixed width as
well. You can try this for the starting outside table:

<TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" BORDER="1" WIDTH="770">

This tells Netscape it only has certain room restictions. With the
relative width method, Netscape 4.7 and below will always adjust for
itself, and often incorrectly as stated in the reference of the
answer. It works fine with every version above these, and in every
other browser.

My outside the answer opinion - Fixed width is better,(going against
the grain here) because your site will always appear how you want it
to. Here's an article that I found interesting:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/fixedvsrelative.shtml

On a side note (thought it may interest you) - I have several sites,
and get thousands of visitors daily. Less that 1 percent of these
visitors use a Netscape browser version lower that 4.7

Thanks again -
SgtCory

Worked like a charm, thanks! :)