Website Design Forum

**DevelopedWeb** · 04-18-2005, 03:21 PM

I'm working on a redesign of a client's website, and I've come across a problem that I have been faced with before.

Sure, I can work around it (even though it's quite a pain), but I am curious as to WHY this happens.

Go to the following URL in IE (I'm using the latest patched version on WinXP, also tested the problem using IE6 on Win98): http://www.funeraldirected.com/newsite/v2/. You will notice that the main content box appears misaligned and that a horizontal scrollbar exists. Now refresh the page, and the box is right where it should be (and there's no scrollbar!).

Why does this happen? I doubt it can be anything other than a bug that would cause a website to change upon refreshing it when no actual changes have been made.

**pencer** · 04-18-2005, 04:46 PM

Hmm, you'll be pleased to know (or maybe not) that it looks fine on my system. Just tested it on a fully patched XP SP2 machine in IE6, again fully patched. Looked fine when it first appeared. Didn't alter when refreshed. It also looked fine in FF 1.0.3.

I think it's going to be one of those annoying bugs that are really hard to replicate!

**DevelopedWeb** · 04-18-2005, 05:27 PM

Try clicking around on some of the navbar items (only the first four are active). I know it sounds crazy, but attempt it a few times and you may just see what I'm seeing. In fact, I'm making this post from a third (completely independent) computer and I am having the same strange horizontal scrolling problem appearing intermittently.

Go figure!

**Republikin** · 04-18-2005, 05:51 PM

Try adding this to your .contentBox css attribute...

Code:

.contentBox {
	width: 740px;
	margin-right: auto;
	margin-left: auto;
}

**davmister_09** · 04-18-2005, 07:34 PM

Yeah that is where i see the problem

**DevelopedWeb** · 04-18-2005, 09:21 PM

Well here's the thing--I fixed the problem already (the fixed version is up at http://www.funeraldirected.com/newsite/). I'm just curious as to why a situation would exist in which a page could be interpreted one way upon the first load and then differently once the page is simply refreshed in IE. Seems to be some bad coding...

I isolated the problem to a piece of code that resided in a single cell which was set to 100% width (ie--to automatically stretch to the remainder of the screen). I used '<TD style="width:100%">' to accomplish this, and thus I had a problem--sometimes, IE would interpret this 100% as an additional 100% of the window's width, thus adding on 1024 pixels to the layout's current size. All I did to fix it was replace that cell's code with '<TD width="100%">' and it works fine.

Has anyone had any experience with CSS width problems in IE, especially with widths changing spontaneously for no apparent reason? The old HTML 'width' attribute still worked fine, but the CSS width property seemed to be misinterpreted by IE in some instances.

**Minaki** · 04-18-2005, 09:40 PM

Not in IE, but I had a simular problem in Firefox:

http://www.rocketuk.com/BeforeF5.jpg
http://www.rocketuk.com/AfterF5.jpg

**DevelopedWeb** · 04-18-2005, 10:08 PM

Very strange! I've also had this problem occur when a page's margins are defined using the old HTML attributes (ie--<BODY topmargin="0" leftmargin="0">). Sometimes the page will first load with full margins, and these margins will only disappear upon refreshing.