[COLUG] Ubuntu / Firefox / Web Design

[Rob Funk]

Mark Erbaugh wrote:
> I've visited lots of other websites with Firefox and not noticed this
> overlapping. I thought HTML was HTML, so I am suprised that this
> website that looks acceptable in one browser looks bad in another.

Support of CSS (Cascading Stylesheets, which control the look of modern 
web sites) is uneven among browsers, and Microsoft has not shown much 
inclination to follow the standards very well.  IE7 is much better at 
following standards than earlier versions of IE though (IE5.x is pretty 
much hopeless), and last I saw IE7 is about half the browser market.

> Is 
> there some sort of magic bullet that is needed to make websites
> compatible with both Internet Explorer and Firefox?

Design for Firefox, then test and adjust in IE7 and IE6.

Use strict HTML 4.01 standards.

Include the full DOCTYPE at the top of the file, including the URL of the 
DTD (which is often omitted for some reason, but things break when you do 
that).

Strip out all styling that Microsoft's exported HTML does, leaving only 
the necessary HTML tags and attributes.  (e.g. get rid of style= 
attributes.)

> Could this be an issue of not using 'standard' web fonts? Are there
> fonts that we should use in Publisher so that the HTML looks better?

It's probably not about fonts, but you should limit your fonts to:
serif: Times New Roman, Times Roman
sans-serif: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica
monospace: Andale Mono, Courier New, Courier

The last fonts in those three lists are for machines that use PostScript 
fonts and don't have the standard TrueType fonts.  Also, your styles 
should includes the type of font (e.g. "sans-serif") as a final fallback 
after the other fonts.

-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"