Sophia, if you're still around, your help desk (and the Blackboard manual, from which they lifted their doc) is on crack (and not even the good crack!) and the sample text file you linked to is correct. No parentheses or quotes are needed. I'll email you with a more detailed answer, but I figure nobody needs to suffer through this stuff if they don't actually have to.

When I did some reading on CSS a while ago, it was pretty well acknowledged that layout issues that could be easily solved with a table were still a major hurdle in CSS.

You've probably done the same reading, but I could dig out a few sites and the sample code they produced, if it would help.

Yeah it would help. The probelm is I'm trying to keep my "columns" of equal width (not length since this is layout I have no border) All the solutions of found (whether involving float or not) that would across browsers involve sizing columns in pixels - which of course varies from computer to computer. I want to size in percents the way you can with tables. But so far no love if I want cross browser compatability. And then I'm still going to h ave to find a a way to degrade gracefully for computers that don't support CSS. So yeah any solutions to the table problem that work with percents would be welcome.

Thanks amych! I hate being in the position where I know enough to KNOW when people are on crack (like this response and the 96 dpi printing thing) but not really know enough to fix it!

It also makes me angry that the person who was helping me was on crack, because she isn't just the help desk, she is the administrator and final arbiter of everything blackboard at my entire school! And she wanted me to buy third party software to solve the issue!

You're doing a three-column?

[link]

Amych-- where did you email me? My old address (ntlr@mail.rochester.edu) goes nowhere-- nbrookstaylor at gmail.com is better....

Actually, I got called away by house stuff for the last hour or so -- I'll send to gmail in a bit (and sorry!)

I am using Blackboard Academic Suite™ (6.3.1.574) on a Windows XP professional with Internet Explorer (I can't figure out which version). I already foudn that Blackboard and Firefox don't seem to play nicely!

This is just a stab in the dark, but is it possible whatever you're using to make the tab-deliminated files isn't sending real tab characters, but is instead replacing them with the correct number of spaces? Many text editors allow you to make that replacement as an option (some programmers, including me, like it that way), but it will wreak havoc with something that's actually looking for tabs (I know this from when i tried to do a make file on unix. Uggh.)

Thanks Plei. The one I found most useful was this: [link] - many fewer bugs. Still had to fight to work across browsers.

And I'm still going to have to browser sniff, and use PHP or other serve side language to serve tables for browsers that don't at least have CSS 2. Don't understand how that is more maintainable than using tables in the first place.

Yeah, glish was the one I would have linked to first.

And I'm still going to have to browser sniff, and use PHP or other serve side language to serve tables for browsers that don't at least have CSS 2.

You shouldn't have to. Properly done, most of the stuff at glish degrades with grace so that users still for some reason use 4.x can get around.

It's been a couple years since I had to tweak any, but as I recall, using @import "cssname.css" for my main css and linking to the alt.css (a dumbed-down version for Netscape 4.x) worked dandy.