Problems with cascade in menus

As usual, it looks right in Firefox 3 but not in IE6.

See http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/nicholls/indexgood.htm
for the desired behavior -- when you hover over the second or third
main menu item, a submenu appears and an item can be selected. (The
links don't go anywhere.) This works in FF and IE.
The style sheet is
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/prodrop4.css

But when I include my own style sheet
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/screen.css
in addition to prodrop4.css, then FF still works but IE now has a gap
between the main line and the sub-menus, so when you try to mouse to
a sub-menu the main item is no longer hovered and the sub-menu
disappears. See
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/nicholls/indexbad.htm

I'm sure there's something about sizing or positioning of the sub-
menus (the inner ULs) isn't being explicitly specified in prodrop4,
but after a couple of hours with the Mozilla DOM inspector I haven't
been able to find it.

Can someone point out what I'm missing? Thanks!


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:07:39 -0400 from Stan Brown
<the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm>:

But when I include my own style sheet
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/screen.css
in addition to prodrop4.css, then FF still works but IE now has a gap
between the main line and the sub-menus, so when you try to mouse to
a sub-menu the main item is no longer hovered and the sub-menu
disappears. See
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/nicholls/indexbad.htm

I'm sure there's something about sizing or positioning of the sub-
menus (the inner ULs) isn't being explicitly specified in prodrop4,
but after a couple of hours with the Mozilla DOM inspector I haven't
been able to find it.

Can someone point out what I'm missing? Thanks!

I figured it out by systematically removing chunks of my own CSS
until the undesired behavior disappeared. It was a declaration
table { margin-top: 1em }

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Stan Brown wrote:

Can someone point out what I'm missing? Thanks!

Hi Stan,

I am not claiming any great expertise here, as much as anything because
when I went through this exercise a few months back I quickly discovered
that with CSS you couldn't really calculate what was going to happen,
you just had to try it out in as many browsers as possible, and attempt
to fix the broken bits (FF for me was the best starting point). It is
coding by trial and error - which means basically doing experiments.
And in any case I have now forgotten most of what I learnt.

So I have only quickly skimmed your CSS. I noticed that the body style
has some padding which will cascade down to other objects. Since older
version of IE had the box model inside out, you may be seeing some
effects of that. You might want to try zeroing that out, and if the
menu works identity the elements that need to have the padding zeroed.

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:35:04 +0800 from David Morris
<dlmorrisDONTSPAM (AT) netwizDONTSPAM (DOT) com.au>:

I noticed that the body style
has some padding which will cascade down to other objects. Since older
version of IE had the box model inside out, you may be seeing some
effects of that. You might want to try zeroing that out, and if the
menu works identity the elements that need to have the padding zeroed.

Thanks for the thought, David. I guess my article of 29 July never
reached your site. As I reported, I solved the problem by a divide-
and-conquer strategy. The working code is now at
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat5808b/

In Lynx, the menus show as nested lists, which seems to be a graceful
degradation.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Stan Brown wrote:

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:35:04 +0800 from David Morris
dlmorrisDONTSPAM (AT) netwizDONTSPAM (DOT) com.au>:
Thanks for the thought, David. I guess my article of 29 July never
reached your site. As I reported, I solved the problem by a divide-
and-conquer strategy. The working code is now at
http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat5808b/

Um nope. I guess the news server here doesn't get to see everything.
This might not be all bad!

Was that you who made the useful suggestions about spelling on my site?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:37:44 +0800 from David Morris
<dlmorrisDONTSPAM (AT) netwizDONTSPAM (DOT) com.au>:

Was that you who made the useful suggestions about spelling on my site?

Maybe, but I have no memory of that, possibly because you didn't say
what your site is. :-)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Stan Brown wrote:

Maybe, but I have no memory of that, possibly because you didn't say
what your site is. :-)

http://www.netwiz.com.au/cssmenu.html

David Morris wrote:

http://www.netwiz.com.au/cssmenu.html

/* We change font size to 62.6 % to make 0.1em == 1px. We then jump all
the other font sizes up and fix some of the cascading effects...

Another "clagnut" lemming, I see. <heavy sigh>

This is the stupidest method ever devised for sizing text. Will this
crap ever go away?

--
Berg

Bergamot wrote:

David Morris wrote:
http://www.netwiz.com.au/cssmenu.html

/* We change font size to 62.6 % to make 0.1em == 1px. We then jump all
the other font sizes up and fix some of the cascading effects...

Another "clagnut" lemming, I see. <heavy sigh

This is the stupidest method ever devised for sizing text. Will this
crap ever go away?

If you are not just sounding off because you think it makes you sound

good, and you really do have a problem with min-font size, upgrade to
FF3. The font sizes are fine there.

David Morris wrote:

Bergamot wrote:

Another "clagnut" lemming, I see. <heavy sigh

If you are not just sounding off because you think it makes you sound
good,

I'm sounding off because clagnut *is* the stupidest method ever devised
for sizing text. It needs to be abolished.

and you really do have a problem with min-font size, upgrade to
FF3.

Yes, I really do have a problem with minimum font size, but you couldn't
pay me to use Firefox. Any version. Or IE, or Safari, for that matter.

The font sizes are fine there.

Perhaps, but it has enough other deficiencies where it's a useless
browser to me.

--
Berg