T

Do you have the URL of the page with the problem?

I see this:

Here you will learn about the Winter Sowing
With the method you'll be able to start a
gazillion
seedlings for pennies, you'll do it outdoors during (*)

Please follow the links to learn how to Winter Sow. The FAQs will show you
many different tips and techniques, they're written in a friendly and *

*the rest of the lines of each paragraph are overlapping onto the paragraphs below, making the page unreadable.

If you get rid of the forced line breaks things will be much better.

I also see a forced table width ... use % instead of pixels and it can adjust as needed.
table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 WIDTH=526

using position:absolute is not a good idea because you have no idea what the user's resolution is. You are forcing my browser to screw up the text because my windows aren't the same size yours are.

Try the link on my page, and mess with font size and browser window width ... notice how plain HTML can wrap without funky line break problems.

Yours though looks to be a design problem.

First, why aren't you using an external style sheet so you can just link all of your pages to it?
Second, why do you have so many classes defined? You don't need to define every paragraph when it's the same style. You also don't need a whole class just to italicize 3 words, just do the words as

As far as your pages though. "Div" is a block level element, it should ONLY be used to define paragraphs, heads, tables etc. Because it's "block level", it will put a line break every time it's used.

For your text you should be using "span". "Span" is an in line element and will NOT add a line break when used.

Why are you putting divisions in for spaces? If you changed the "div" to

This

I'm working on some changes right now and will save it for HTML 3.2 as opposed to 4.0. That should help considerably. I'll have the reformatiing done by this evening.....it's only about 65 pages. Sigh.

T

You need to minimize your usage of the absolute positioning
as poohbear suggested and you really should simplify your
style sheet. You should also strongly consider using an
external style sheet, especially if you are going to
continually add more and more pages.
Use the external style sheet to define different font and header classes etc.
Then use an inline style sheet to
control the positioning, if you have to.

For example, if you defined a background in the external
css, you could change it on ALL of your pages instantly
by changing just the external css.

Take a look and see if you notice any improvement. Don't forget to hit reload ;-)

Modern site building programs come with the CSS built in....this is not noveau technology and I need to design the site for the future. CSS is the new wave and old hard drives are going to be phased out.

Yours looks much better - I can change font size without having the layout go too bad on me.

You are still forcing line breaks and explicit table cell size, which is poor design practice ... size tables by %, not number of pixels.

The "NOWRAP" makes the page shove off to the right with my preferred font size. The height 45 may also be messing up the page.

td NOWRAP VALIGN="TOP" ALIGN="CENTER" HEIGHT=45/
font FACE="Times New Roman,serif" SIZE=2 COLOR=red//b//u/
/a HREF="Puzzle_Page.html"/
where you'll find word
puzzles to print out, enjoy /br/
and learn with.


You can use CSS in such a manner that older browsers just ignore it (called "degrading gracefully) and still see a usable page ... "Web Studio" insists on sticking in code that defeats the purpose of CSS, such as the font size and color.

Thanks,

Trudi

Uh ... Windows 95 is not a browser it's an operating system and has nothing to do with the problems I have on your page. I am using MOZILLA (v1.3) as a browser. Mozilla runs on Linux (any version), UNIX (most versions), SUN Solaris, and anything Microsoft from Win95 through WinXP. It also runs on Mac OS-10.

"and you should be able to see my site as it should be."

Here's a clue ... the fastest way to lose a visitor is to tell them that they have to upgrade browsers, download FLASH, or do something besides click on links. If you don't like the horse I rode in on, I can find a friendlier saloon.

If you want a widely visited usable site, versus a vanity site, the design issue is not "how cool should I be", it's "how many potential customers do you want to turn away because they find your site onerous to use"? Simple is better.

I've worked on several corporate web sites: one major credit card company, one leading computer chip maker, and a couple of smaller (but still multinational) electronics company sites. We made sure that the site was workable no matter what browser was being used ... none of the "eye candy" was essential.

That's your choice.

To take care of the "maybe it's an obsolete OS" theory, I downloaded Mozilla 1.6b (released December 9th, 2003) for my Win95 system and looked at the page. I also checked the page while running SuSE Professional 9.0, Mandrake 9.2, and Knoppix 3.3 (Linux operating systems all released within the last 9 months or so) and the most recent browsers (FireBird, Mozilla, Galeon, etc.) ... and that page still has the same problem with text running off to the right.

In short, the problems, which are DESIGN problems in your web page HTML code, remain no matter which OS and browser I try. A good web designer (or web creating program) can produce pages which are browser independent, and look good for all visitors.

I prefer larger font sizes for ease of reading, which means the "NOWRAP", forced table cell sizes, forced font sizes, and other "WYSIWYG" features that WebStudio inserts as you drag and drop things into the page do not display for me the way you think they will.

So what's the problem if one person can't see the page? Well, when you take into consideration all the aging boomers like me who use the web, with our developing presbyopia and increasing fondness for big print ... it makes sense to make sure that font size changes don't screw up the page. It's not just one person. Presented with a hard-to-read page, most people will not bothre to tell you about it - they hit the back button and try a different site.

And your complaint (via email) that I am "the only truly rude person I've had to deal with here, you come off like a ton of bricks. I suggest you learn some manners." ... I'm being blunt, not rude. Your page has design problems. If you don't want to hear about design problems, don't ask for help making pages work better.

... he's seeing the same problem I do when he increases font size. I even tried MSIE and I see the page vanish off the right edge of the screen if I increase font size in it. It's the HTML code, not hardware, operating systems or browsers.

Thanks,
Susan