Nathan,

Not knowing exactly what you are trying to acheive, but having, what I
think, is a fairly good idea, let me put forth this tidbit of info I learned
when building a framed interface once:

MSIE, Mozilla, N6, Opera, and the rest all build their frames based on what
you define. If the left column is to be 100px wide and the top frame is to
be 50px high, and the dataframe is to fill the rest of the space, that's
what they give you.

N4 and below, however, don't understand pixel dimensions. Instead, they take
your defined number and the actual width of the browsing window, divide them
into each other and come up with a percentage. This percentage is then
rounded to the nearest integer. Then, they use this percentage to define the
frame dimensions. As such, depending on the size and complexity of the
frameset, you have only a slim chance of the frame lining up perfectly in
Netscape as it does in the rest. I used to have a link to a reference
describing this, but have since deleted it (sorry).

My suggestion is to do as others have mentioned: use tables or CSS for
positioning. Tables would likely be your best bet for complete backward
compatibility, as N4 deals with CSS Positioning even less gracefully than it
does frames.

Good luck,
Kehvan M. Zydhek


----- Original Message -----
From: "Nathan Lyle" <natlyle(at)nmu.edu>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 18:08
Subject: Margins 'n stuff


| This may be the wrong list for the questions (if so I apologize, and
please
| feel free to ignore it)
|
| I gave up on something a long while ago, but recently tried to use it and
| still couldn't get it to work for me. I wanted to use frames (I know,
yuch)
| to simulate an interface. This included having graphics in different
frames
| that have to line up to make the illusion "work". The old problem (that
| still reared it's head) is that I can't get a consistant frame size for
| both Netscape and IE. A frame column set to 130 is one size in one browser
| and another size in another.
|
| Any ideas?
|
| Ack.
|
| ~Nathan Lyle   (The Tragic Comedian Poet)
|
| Email:  natlyle(at)nmu.edu    or    jopling(at)geocities.com
| Web: http://euclid.nmu.edu/~natlyle
| Phone: 906-227-5736
|
| "Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master." -
| Demosthenes (384 B.C.-322 B.C.)
|
|

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