Thu, 2003-06-19 18:12
I am having a problem where, when a page is getting large, the middle pane is growing bigger than it is meant to. My site has a leftbar, middle pane, and rightbar. I want the leftbar to take up fixed pixels, rightbar the same, and for the middle to take up "the rest". This works, until a lot of content is placed in the middle where it starts to grow and the browser gets a horizontal scrollbar.
Is there a way to MAKE IE never put a horiz scrollbar on?
An example of a page where the overflow happens is:
here,
and an example of where it works fine is:
here.
Any help would be greatly appreciated... it's driving me nuts! 
Cheers
Thu, 2003-06-19 20:52
#1
IE6 making area bigger than I want
Declare a DOCTYPE (first thing on the top line of the HTML)<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
My guess is that the box for the content in the first example is set to 100%, which without a DOCTYPE IE is deciding to do strange things with. Either that or there's content that is wider than you want.
But Mozilla still has the scrollbar (albeit a bit smaller)... and you can't view any page at 800x600 without scrollbars. There must be something in the content of the div (as well as the DOCTYPE)
There is a way to just turn the scrollbar off, but then you can't get at the content that's off-screen... which is bad.
Thu, 2003-06-19 20:54
#2
IE6 making area bigger than I want
#ahem#... sorry... it's not the doctype... am looking into it more now...
Thu, 2003-06-19 21:40
#3
doctype etc
Hi -
I tried the doctype, but as you said... that isn't the problem.
In the past I have seen people having lines like:
foo bar whee.......
and the browser couldn't wrap that. I looked through these pages and didn't see that. This behaviour only seems to happen when there are lots and lots of content on the screen, and IE just says "screw it, let me stretch it" instead of listening to me 
I really appreciate this help btw.
Cheers
Fri, 2003-06-20 07:45
#4
IE6 making area bigger than I want
Yeah I was looking for a line with loads of &'s in it, but couldn't find one. It's not the thread box at the top, it's a message... will track it down soon...
Fri, 2003-06-20 08:09
#5
IE6 making area bigger than I want
Very, very dodgy.
Firstly I remember Mozilla at home (on a 1024 screen) still 'choking' and putting in a scrollbar. But here at work (on a 1280 screen) it's fine.
IE, on the other hand... well I started to remove content from the middle bit, and each time I did the scrollbar got a fraction smaller. About 15 posts in it was fine (on this size monitor!) There's no stray DIVs lying around adding padding or margins or something equally strange each time...
Some browsers obviously don't appreciate 300k+ HTML files. Sorry I can't really find a solution... except to break the page down a bit? Probably not possible though.
Fri, 2003-06-20 14:06
#6
Thanks for your help
Thanks for checking it out. The only other thing I thought of was trying to programatically do something in javascript.
E.g. onLoad: set the main table width to be the same as the top table width.
but IE isn't letting me do that.
Thanks again.
Thu, 2003-07-10 23:07
#7
Table width
Try this...?
Where you specify the main table in these lines....
<table id="main-structure" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
...specify the table width as 800 (or 1024 - take your pick!)
<table id="main-structure" cellspacing="0" width="800">
<tr>
Alternatively, you could simply specify the central cell width (say 650?) by replacing......
<td id="main-content">
....with this:-
<td id="main-content" width="650">
Hope this helps.