[Avenir]

alright, for the life of me, I cannot get this to work:

http://www.avenirex.com/v6/portfolio.html

All I want is for the div ("scrollbar") that holds the scroll bar to float between the left ("project") and the right ("projectlist") divs. I have the left set to float: left and the right to float: right. I've tried everything to make that central div float. I stripped all the content out of the three divs, and they seem to float ok. But I can't pinpoint which div is the problem, nor can I figure out what code in what div is causing the scrollbar div to drop to the bottom. I'm basically at my wits end here, and am about 5 seconds away from just using an iframe for the right-side content and using the system scrollbar. I've tried reordering the divs within the .html code, no luck. I've played with "clear" tags, although I'm sketchy on how they work, but that didn't seem to help either. Please, if anyone can clear this up, I would be eternally grateful

bonus point: when you scroll with the bar, it leaves bits of gray in its tracks. The original code (http://www.dyn-web.com/dhtml/scroll/ ) did not do this, but I'll settle for one solution at a time right now.

[Millennium]

What browser are you showing problems with?

There is, sadly, a long-standing problem with Gecko, such that if you have many floating DIVs followed by some non-floated content, the non-floated content will only flow around the last floated item, rather than all of the floated items as it should.

The only way I've found around this is to restructure the page, such that there is at most one item floating to the left and one floating to the right of the unfloated content. For example, you might enclose all items to go on the left into a single div, float only that div to the left, and then do something similar for items to go on the right.

This is one of the few remaining actual standards-compliance problems with Gecko. You can ignore something and still be compliant -the standards allow that, and in fact suggest that you do this if you can't support something completely- but to try to support something and get it wrong, as Gecko is doing with floats, is a problem.

[registered_user]

I didn't spend a lot of time mucking with it, but I did discover that changing
#project {width:600px; ... }
to
#project {width:500px; ... }
seemed to keep your scrollable area where you want it.

[Avenir]

Thank you both for the replies. I can't believe it was as simple as the 500 vs. 600 px width for the left div. I had tried that a dozen times before, but there must have been some glitch else that was fixed. In any case, it seems that will do it. I still think I'm going to take millenium's suggestion and wrap the right scroll and list in a single div, and float that right, just to be safe.

Thanks again so much for the help, it was driving me batty last night, and now I'll be able to work in peace.

[Avenir]

Oh, and, another note: the "Edit CSS" function of the "web developer" toolbar extension in Firefox is a godsend. I might never work in Dreamweaver code again (ok, maybe not)

[Avenir]

I'm adding to this (so as to avoid creating a new post on a similar subject). I've pretty much finished the new page update with minor tweaking and some other stuff. Finally (and I know I should have been doing this all along), I previewed it on a windows IE. The same problem as above is occuring again, only on Windows IE. At this point, this whole thing seems a bit too much just to not use the system scroll bar, but it works everywhere but WinIE.

If anyone out there has any advice on how to maybe make this better work on winIE, I'd be much obliged.

http://www.avenirex.com/v6/portfolio.html

(As a side note, my cousin downstairs, who has the only Windows box in the house and is my tester for all things Windows related, actually all but deleted IE from her machine, and she now uses Firefox. I had to root around to dig it up just to preview my page. Ahh... if only the rest of the world coupld follow her lead )