AgoraCart Free User Forums

hell-o
looking at your source it appears you aren't nesting your tables enough. if using one or two tables then everything is based on the global parameters. when nesting the parameters change (in relation to height and width) to the outer table. so the more you nest tables within tables the more control you have and can realize expected placement of contents. xbrowser complance with nestscape is tough. generally if you code to netscape then most other browsers will fall in line. but you wont get exact desired results from all browsers. also, netscape defines colors differently than ie or even opera i think. another things is netscape will collapse tables and cells. best thing there is to tile a bg image in a color. for example if you have some txt in a cell and you want the cell to also act as a fixed height and width to maintain the layout then do a bg image like so...
1px width x 150px height in the color of your design.

<td valign=top align=center height="150" width="150"> this is the cell you want 150 high
<table valign=top align=center height="150" width="150" background=my_spacer.pic" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> this is the nested table for content control
<tr>
<td valign=top align=center height="150" width="150"> all the text here</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>

the text will expand the width to 150 then wrap. the bg image will maintain the 150 height as required. the bg image color will render much better xbrowser then any color code and is small enough to not add much pageload. the real trick is to force the dang thing to tile in opera. take a look at this site:

http://www.theamdals.com/

examine the code. this was a simple free template off the net. but of course unusable unless you had only two words per page. i had to join/flatten then reslice the design. then force the left menu and the right border to tile. you can see the left and the right are different means for calling the bg image. one is straight html and the other is css. they both work just fine. but the key is nesting and control.

here is a less busy one. same situation. free template but unuseable. notice onloading the left menu bg image. this tiles just fine and layers great in opera:

http://www.visionarybeading.com/

i don't have netscape. i wont have anything aol on my pc. so i just code to ie, opera and firefox.

hope that all makes sense. if i have time tonight i'll look over your layout for you.

regards,
dan

Thanks for your reply. I have been working so hard in my sites at moving away from tables to CSS and accessibility that nesting more tables just seems so ... so WRONG!! But perhaps it is a necessary evil...

So far I have the thing kludged so that it kind of looks OK in all of the browsers I have to try it on, but not really what I am after. When I look at the source of a dynamicly generated page I can see there are places where the tags don't all match up, and someday I will have to sort through it, figure out whether the unmatched parties are coming from the productpage, header, footer or some other place in the universe and straighten it out. That should at least give me more consistency. I still can't figure out where that wretched center tag is coming from in between the header and the productpage...

hell-o
well, the table stuff is the framework of the store. i actually prefer tables. oh well to each his own.
i see the page is looking much better for alignment. looks really good!

you can find the center tag in the store/admin_files/agora_user_lib.pl

116 on my editor...
$sc_product_display_header = qq!<CENTER><TABLE BORDER=0 WIDTH=520>!;
the 520 will be whatever you set up in the manager>cart display

you will probably find the closing tag in the library/agora.setup.db file
line 311
$sc_product_display_footer = qq!</TABLE></CENTER>!;
i think that's it.

one problem maybe with the agora_user_lib.pl file. this file is updated whenever you save stuff from the manager screen. so if you remove the center tag then later submit changes to the store manager you may get the danged thing back. so you'll have to go to the proteced folder and find the appropriate lines which write to this file (could be cart_display-ext_lib.pl or not. good place to start and look for multiple instances!) and make sure it's not including the center tag on each submit. i'm sure it is. if you need help locating the code let me know.
regards,
dan

Dan wrote:

i see the page is looking much better for alignment. looks really good!

Thank you! It has been kicking my deflated human chair cushion for three days now.... :wink:

Thanks for the pointers on where to find things. These tags do keep turning up like bad pennies all the time.