Reading this post:
http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/316

My friend and I are trying to debug why we can't get the left sidebar to display down all the way.

The link to our site is:
http://www.cyberbuzz.gatech.edu/acm/gall/upe.php

We're trying to adjust "absolute" now and we got our scrollbar on the side, but it introduced a lot more style formatting- we have containers up the wazoo.

We're working on it now, so you'll probably see the website being changed a lot these hours. =).



Does anyone know why this site would be loading nicer in mozilla and not-so-nicely in IE 6?

To put it bluntly, IE blows.

IE 5.5 and 6.0 have fairly crappy CSS support. Apparently, IE 5 doesn't support the CSS box model and instead implements its own, and neither version uses the right CSS float model, but instead uses one of their own design.

Looking at your site right now, it's not even looking right in Mozilla, but that's probably because of your ongoing changes. What I'm seeing right now is a lot like frames, with about the top 1/4 of the window showing your site, but it looks like a div with the overflow setting showing scrollbars. The lower 3/4 of the page are blank.

Within that div, or what can be seen of it a piece at a time by scrolling, there's a paragraph about Upsilon Pi Epsilon that's scrunched over to the left, while to the right about 4/5 of the div is blank space; at the lower left corner of that blank space, which stops where the paragraph stops, is a small ACM logo. And this is just in Mozilla.

One thing I can tell you off the bat is that putting overflow and overflow-y in your body style is a very bad idea. I believe this is what's confusing IE; it's not doing Mozilla any favors either. In IE I see the whole page, but the up/down scrollbar is disabled.

The scrunched logo problem looks more like a table mistake. You're using a table in a place where it doesn't make any sense to: in the "boxedindent" div that holds all the text. Those two images should really be floated.

The only other problem I saw in IE is that the calendar is too wide and escapes its div. Partly that's a font size problem, and partly I think you could stand to change "Sun", "Mon", etc. to "Su", "M", and so on.

The font sizes are also an issue. IE doesn't properly support the CSS sizes of small, x-small, medium, etc.; it thinks small is the default size of the page and renders accordingly, so all your fonts so sized appear bigger in IE (or smaller in everything else) than they should. It's much safer for you to use percentages or em units.

Lummox JR

Wow, that really helped.

Thanks for the expertise, your post was awesome.

Regards,
-Krystian.