[Mac Guru]

In the beginning when I was in the beta testing stages of my new design it looked EXACTLY the same in Dreamweaver as it did in my browser.. so I released the design to the public then something WIERD happened.

In my design I have a small header table at the top that is 100% wide by 95px tall so it won't stretch. In the middle it is 100% wide by 100% tall and that is where the content goes for each page. And my footer table is 100% by 40px so IT stays the same. In three of my pages there isn't enough content to make the page long enough to scroll but for some reason it's acting like there are like 20 line breaks above and below my content making a LOT of dead space around it and it looks UGLY.

Here's what I mean:

<img src="http://www.jamesmeister.com/postimg/dwpage.jpg" alt=" - " />

<img src="http://www.jamesmeister.com/postimg/brwsrpage.jpg" alt=" - " />

Does anyone know how to fix this?

BTW you can check out my source code at jamesmeister.com if you think you can help me.

Thanks!
Mac Guru

[Raman]

table widths of 100% usually work fine. you can't rely on setting heights of tables in percentages... sorry.. you may have to use javascript to dynamically set the table height whenever someone resizes their browser.

[Mac Guru]

Can you elaborate on that Javascript point? Thanks, I don't know JS very well so I need some help.

Thanks,
Mac Guru

[larkost]

The problem is that percentage heights are not really defined in html, you should never use them. After all, what is the percentage referring to? The height of the window (and what happens when that changes). The height of the enclosing object? The height of the page?

Browsers define a percentage width because they are then free to mess with the heights of all the box objects to make things fit, trying to be deterministic with both height and width makes the calculations into a very complex symbolic math equation (second order differential equation where you are looking for an eigenvalue). Just not worth it.

To sum it all up... forget the percentage height idea... it will never be standard browser to browser.

[Mac Guru]

So how do you suggest I anchor the page to the bottom of the window? This design does not work any other way.

Mac Guru

[Vasudevelopa]

Edit: woops, didn't look at your code close enough.

I took the liberty of fixing it for you...
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/~vasudeva1/test.html" target="_blank">http://homepage.mac.com/~vasudeva1/test.html</a>

<small>[ 07-24-2002, 01:35 AM: Message edited by: Vasudevelopa ]</small>

[Mac Guru]

ok you did what I had orriginally done but the problem arrises in several versions of IE and Netscape that the tabel cells ALL scale with the browser rather than staying a fixed thickness. So in essence a very tall window yeilds very fat cells when they should be thin.

That is why I had divided them into three table groups.

Mac Guru

[larkost]

The problem is that there is no good STANDARD way of positioning something at the bottom of both the document and the window. There are a whole number of hacks, but every one of them is fragile. They break too easily. The only way of doing it is to use flash, where this sort of thing is taken into account.

I have looked long and hard for this sort of thing, but it simply can't be done in a reliable manner in html. There are a number of CSS and JavaScript hacks, but they are simply unreliable.

[Raman]

In javascript you'll have to get the innerheight of the window. then set the table height to that number of pixels minus any fudge factors based on cellpadding, cellspacing, margin heights and widths, etc..

you should also trigger teh javascript when the browser is resized.

[Xeo]

Why won't setting a height of "*" work? Isn't that the way you tell it to "fill in the space"?

[Superchicken]

one thing you could do, is use a frame.
OR you could set the thing to default

set the align to valign="bottom"

that might help keep it at the bottom, but... yeah unfortunately you have to remember what HTML can do in your designs.