call for help to masters of CSS

[bitterpants]

im having insane trouble making CSS positioning work in IE for mac, even though it seems to be working just fine for other browsers and on windows machines. if i use a table instead of CSS for positioning/layout i lose all the font and backgroud stuff defined in my CSS file.

if you might be willing to help or even let me know what you see w/your system and browser setup you can find the details of my problem here:

http://www.imbetterthanyou.net/tectest/helpme.html

this page includes links to all the source and screenshots of how the page is displayed on my machine in both opera and IE.

the page itself is here:

http://www.imbetterthanyou.net/tectest/testthis.html

any feedback and assistance is GREATLY appreciated.

jen

[Strike]

Well, one problem I notice even in a browser that does the positioning correctly is that you assume they use a certain font size. The fonts I have fit perfectly into the box only if I'm zoomed at 80% on the page. Otherwise they overflow the box.

What I don't understand is why you are using stacking like that. Why not just throw it all into the table instead of slapping divs and spans on the page as well?

[bitterpants]

the font size is specified in the css file. under the body tag.
also, its stacked like that cause this is the page before all the elements have been added to it. there will be lots more layers, and a whole smorgassboard of hiding and showing of the layers. if this was all that was gonna be on the page in the end, i would put all the stuff you see now in one nice neat little container.

by some random act of the rendering gods i have since managed to make it work using a table. (have yet to test on a *nix machine but it works in IE and opera on mac, and nutscrape on windows)
example here:
http://www.imbetterthanyou.net/tectest/superhappytest1.html

i would still prefer a tableless solution, so if anyone has any suggestions, please *do* share.

j

[bitterpants]

as an aside, if youd like to note just what you get when you view the page[s], please let me know what os and what browser youre using. thanks. jen

[bitterpants]

alright. i figured it out! there are two spans inside a div per line on the menu. i had line breaks after each span. i changed it so there is

<div...<span...</span....<span...</span...</div

without a line break. this made it work beautifully. so there, you go, line breaks are bad when you want spans to line up together if its being viewed w/IE on a mac.

jen