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.

Except I don't think you can do columns the way I want in netscape 4x.

The idea is that the first two columns are content- equal width taking up however much the browser window will allow, and the right column is a menu column of small percent width. Can you really do that in netscape 4.x without tables?

The idea is that the first two columns are content- equal width taking up however much the browser window will allow, and the right column is a menu column of small percent width. Can you really do that in netscape 4.x without tables?

I guess the point I was trying to make is that, done properly, you have a site that works and looks logical, if not pretty in Netscape 4.x, that can be read and navigated within. No, you're not going to get the layout you want there, BUT you're also not going to potentially fuck over people using screen readers, etc, your pages will be smaller, and maintaining things is going to be much easier. (My redesign from tables to CSS yonks ago took 13 hours. My last redesign took maybe 30 minutes, and I probably paused to check my email and eat a cookie.)