[surferboy]

I confess in advance that I am using tables to help me with my layout. I have read a little on how to make a cell have a scroll bar- so that one cell can stay stationary with navigation, and the center cell can scroll. It does not seem too difficult. That said, each browser hands it a little differently.

What's strange to me is that in Safari, some of my pages seem to work perfectly, and others have a large blank space at the bottom of the cell with the scroll bar.

Does anyone mind looking at two examples: one that works well, and one that does not (it has too much blank space at the bottom).

The method used is identical, but the results are different in these two documents- can't quite figure it out. Thanks!

[- - e r i k - -]

I beg you please not to implement any of these examples, they are ugly and they break with human interface guidelines as well as common sense. Please!

[iMOTOR]

Originally Posted by surferboy

one that works well, and one that does not

I would have to agree that neither design "works well". Keep in mind that very few people using your site will have 1200px high browser windows. If it's absolutely necessary to have a scrollable table cell, I would keep the div hight no higher than about 600px.

[skalie]

Do it yourself surgery?

[surferboy]

I picked 1200 px simply because that seemed to roughly match the navigation on the left reasonably well. As soon as you hit the bottom of the navigation on the left, then the middle of the screen starts scrolling.

From the content of the examples, and the horrible code- you might have figured out that web developing is not my day job. I appreciate the constructive criticism, but I still don't have an answer as to why the browser handles one "normally" and the other "abnormally".

[surferboy]

Also, scrollable table cells are not a must- it seemed to be a way to make the navigation on the left relatively constant while allowing a viewer to scroll through the content.

Again- not my day job, but I think that most of audience for these pages will be able to figure out what's on the page.

[skalie]

For me ( 1024 x 728 ), I get two scroll bars, I scroll the left one, then need to scroll the right one to see all the content, which is kind of less than intuitive.

Lose the scroll, works for Yahoo!.

imho

[surferboy]

Now that's some good advice. I did the whole site without scroll bars, but it occured to me that it would be nice to have left sided navigation visible all the time. Don't want to use frames- and ocassionaly a technical description can get long- winded and I'd rather not break up the pages. But, I think you are right- ditch the scrolls

Everyone agree?

[skalie]

Originally Posted by surferboy

ocassionaly a technical description can get long- winded and I'd rather not break up the pages.

Terribly old fashioned, but if the content gets lengthy you could add ^^top^^ tags every once and a while.

[Chuckit]

What's screwing up your layout is the float:left image at the bottom of the div. Because it's so close to the bottom, WebKit is padding it with extra space that's running outside the overflow. I am not an expert of any sort, so I couldn't say for sure that Safari's behavior isn't actually somehow correct, but this looks like a bug in WebKit to me.

And I agree on not having it scroll. The double-scrolling layout is a much bigger pain than having to go back to the top if you want to switch to another part of the site.

[surferboy]

That makes good sense. What is Webkit? This was done with DW, but "by hand" within DW. I just started playing with the scrolls to see if it would work. I tend to get obsessed trying to get something "to work" when I run into a problem.

I am satisfied with a good explanation, and will probably ditch the scrolls- I agree it's a little cumbersome.

Thanks for the good advice.

[Chuckit]

WebKit is the framework that Safari (as well as a few other apps) uses to render Web pages.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by skalie

For me ( 1024 x 728 ), I get two scroll bars, I scroll the left one, then need to scroll the right one to see all the content, which is kind of less than intuitive.

Very glad to see the scroll bars are going to be gotten rid of (there’s an awkward construction); just one additional note to skalie’s point:

If I scroll the table cell by double-finger-dragging on my PowerBook trackpad (or, I assume, with a mouse scroll wheel), it scrolls within the table cell, but the main scroll bar also scrolls, except they scroll out of synch and at different speeds. This is just about enough to make me seasick.

[If someone else posted the same while I was typing this, sorry: I started typing this post about two hours ago and just finished now]

[surferboy]

I agree- the scrolling was suboptimal, but once I noticed that I could make it work on one page and not another- it became a problem solving issue. Like I said, I get obsessed with "solving the problem".

Thanks