Greg G. wrote:
You are using layers (DIV tags) in your pages. Unfortunately, these
use fixed locations, and different fonts will cause the problems you
are seeing on certain browsers. As the fonts scale up and down,
taking varying amounts of real-estate on the screen, the Layers stay
stationary, fixed at a certain percentage or pixels from the top and
left side.
Layers are what you should be using now that CSS support has matured in
all browsers. CSS support is not perfect in all browsers, but I have
found that it is adequate to do what I want for my personal website. You
can specify if a layer has a fixed or variable size, and you can specify
if it's location is fixed or dynamic.
I would sit down with a piece of paper and come up with a layout that
suits you, and translate it into Tables, and avoid the use of Layers
entirely. Think about press layout/markups. Think Columns and Rows.
I have to disagree with designing page layout based on tables. This
restricts your page layout to be only what you can accomplish with table
tags. You should only use tables when you need to present data in a
table fashion, but do not design your entire page around tables.
However, if you don't want to use CSS, then you can use tables for page
layout. However, using tables over CSS for page layout is analogous to
driving a riding lawn mower to work instead of using a car. Both get you
there, but one of them does a much better job.
Use fonts that are present as native or substitutes on Macs, PCs,
Windoze and Unix systems.
This is important, as not everyone can see fonts that you may have
installed on your computer.
Take a look at my site.
The big advantage of CSS is being able to restructure your site without
modifying HTML code. My site has a header at the top, links on the left,
and content on the right. If I decided to put the links on the right and
remove the header, I can do this for every page on my website just by
editing 1 css file.
If you want to get a feel for how powerful CSS is, visit
http://www.csszengarden.com
Look at the various pages that people have submitted to see how the
layouts change by only modifying the 1 CSS file. People do create lots
of images that are defined in the CSS files to achieve their own look.
--
Brad Curfman
http://www.curfman.net