I am maintaining a very large and very old website that was built using tables. I have always run the website using table widths of 100% so it will automatically resize to fit the visitor's display.

Now with the newer widescreen displays I find that the website really looks dumb if it is displayed at a screen width of 1680 pixels so I decided to restrict the width to 1280 pixels or less.

Now the problem: I recognize that IE doesn't recognize 'max-width' in CSS so I simply added another table around the 'outside' of the entire page. Looks something like:
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" color="#000000">
<tr>
<td width="1280" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" >

Existing page inserted here..... <table width=100%> etc. etc. etc....

</td>
</tr>
</table>

This solves the problem perfectly in IE. Webpage displays correctly at 800 pixels wide, 1024 pixels wide, 1280 pixels wide and at 1680 I get a page that is 1280 with a black background as described by bgcolor="#000000" in first table.

However, when I display the page in either Firefox or Netscape the page always displays at 1280 pixels wide (it gives me that terrible scroll bar at the bottom of the page)...

What am I doing wrong??

Thanks for any suggestions.

JohnJ

Nevermind.... The problem wasn't in the tables at all.... It was actually in the external css file that I link to - - Obviously Firefox and Netscape handle external CSS better than IE.... I'm embarrased but the problem was mine all along....

IE (6 and below) does a LOUSY job of rendering CSS and has so many bugs you really cannot rely on what it's showing you to be what the other browsers will display.

The old problem with Firefox and IE