Table Contents Centering in IE under XHMTL

registered · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:12 am

RN2.10 switched the doctype to XHTML transitional. I have noticed the following under IE6 and IE7:

I had a center forums block that consisted of a table wrapped in center tags (centering the table itself). Before the switch the text *in the table* was left justified in all browsers I tried. After I switched to RN2.10, the contents of the table suddenly became centered in IE6 & IE7, but remained left justified in Firefox.

The Ourscripts.net shoutbox text suddenly became centered under IE6 & IE7. It is still left justified in Firefox.

The bars in the forums polls suddenly became centered instead of left justified in IE6 & IE7. I haven't looked but I bet it is the same "table wrapped in center tags" issue.

This is probably an IE issue, as Firefox's behavior seems unchanged, but something to watch out for. I will probably be adding align="left" attributes to the td tags to fix.

registered · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:29 am

What theme are you using. I have noticed various "oddities" based on the themes.

In order to make the raw nuke code XHTML compliant, we had to FIX some of the code to make it work properly. Unfortunately, we knew that it could also break some themes. Something that we would just have to help folks out with as the exceptions popped up.

Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:39 am

It is a theme of my own making, and I just got it to validate under XHTML 1.0 transitional last weekend. I've noticed these quirks only under IE. It seems to act like it did prior to RN2.10 under Firefox. I sort of trust Firefox more for compliance, but who knows....?

Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 5:48 pm

I looked into this a bit...did some googling over lunch. It appears that the rules for centering have changed with XHTML and the IE behavior is technically correct. It seems that an outer alignment directive now applies to an inner container unless overridden.

Also, the center tag is deprecated even in HTML 4.0.

I modified my viewtopic_poll_result.tpl file to add an align="left" on a td tag to get the poll bars to line up again. I can post the change if anyone is interested.

Also while googling I found many articles and blog entries from people decrying XHTML, saying people should stick to HTML 4.0 strict and then go to HTML 5 when it comes out.

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 6:11 am

You might want to try out this statement:

Quote:

It appears that the rules for centering have changed with XHTML

by checking it with HTML 4.0 Transitional and/or Strict and see how it behaves...

Regarding this:

Quote:

Also while googling I found many articles and blog entries from people decrying XHTML, saying people should stick to HTML 4.0 strict and then go to HTML 5 when it comes out.

I'm not convinced yet. Besides, the HTML Newsletter 1.3 version was HTML 4.0 Strict. To make it XHTML 1.0 Transitional or Strict should require minimal changes and I cannot imagine it presenting differently.

Something had to be done to start pushing the add-on makers to start cleaning up their code. Since PHP-Nuke already as it was had so many compliance errors in it, there was no point in making your add-ons / hacks compliant. However, the game has now been changed...

Yes, we may have "broken" some themes and add-ons, but in the end, we will have helped move the community towards better, more compliant, code.

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 6:58 am

I am certainly not an expert in this area. However, HTML 4.0 Strict is a standard, and there are people out there saying XHTML is not going to be the next step forward. In any event, it does look like XHTML changed the centering rules, as a quick google of XHTML and center produces lots of hits of people trying to wrestle with the new issues. Maybe switching to XHTML, even transitional, was a bit premature. We have such a large legacy code base that maybe HTML 4.0 strict would have been a better increment. As you said, the difference between HTML 4.0 strict and XHTML transitional shouldn't be that great, and at least the centering rules are the same with HTML 4.0.

I don't know. Anyway, be prepared for getting a lot of questions in these forums on why things are centered differently under RN2.10. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Hopefully it can be easily overcome.

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 7:03 am

No arguments there. The problem was that PHP-Nuke was not even HTML 4.0 Transitional compliant and to make it 4.0 Strict would have been 10 times more work than XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This release would have gone another year. I know this because I had made the HTML Newsletter 1.3 version HTML 4.0 Strict to prove that it could be done (of course, the only way to validate is to cut out the generated source and paste into a "skeleton" page for strictly validation purposes - what a pain that was).

Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 7:06 am

I see. Interesting. Well when we make a new CMS system from scratch we can do it right. Wink