Re: Height style not honored in XHML doc

beveled edges wrote:

In my simple XHTML doc the height property isn't being honored for the
table when I omit the xml declaration in IE6.

This is because the presence of the XML prolog forces IE6 out of standards
mode and into quirks mode. When it is missing (and IE sees what it
considers to be a Doctype that means the author of the document knows what
they are doing) IE goes into standards mode.

I suggest you look up exactly what height: 100% should do in CSS when the
parent element doesn't have a specified height.


--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>

Thanks for your reply!
How can you check which mode IE is parsing HTML in? Is there a DOM property
or any other way to programmatically access such information?

Cheers,
Aeden

"David Dorward" <dorward (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

beveled edges wrote:

In my simple XHTML doc the height property isn't being honored for the
table when I omit the xml declaration in IE6.

This is because the presence of the XML prolog forces IE6 out of standards
mode and into quirks mode. When it is missing (and IE sees what it
considers to be a Doctype that means the author of the document knows what
they are doing) IE goes into standards mode.

I suggest you look up exactly what height: 100% should do in CSS when the
parent element doesn't have a specified height.


--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/

"Aeden Jameson" <jholik@u.washington.edu> wrote:

How can you check which mode IE is parsing HTML in?

Wrong question.

Is there a DOM
property or any other way to programmatically access such
information?

Wrong question.

It is relatively well documented, partly even by Microsoft itself, what
makes IE go into intentionally broken ("quirks") mode and what happens in
that mode. Try googling for "doctype switching". Alternatively, write
your document according to HTML 4.01 specification, and you will avoid
that mode. You need to be careful, though, up to and including the
strange requirement that one of three DOCTYPE alternatives be used
_literally_.

This will ensure that the width attribute is ignored in <table> elements,
as it should.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

This will ensure that the width attribute is ignored in <table
elements, as it should.

Oops, I meant the height attribute, of course.

(There's no logical reason why HTML 4 permits the width attribute but not
the height attribute, but when authoring according to best
recommendations, you don't need either of them.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html