As some of you have noticed this WebLog does not work terribly well with FireFox. The main reason is that there appears to be a bug in FireFox that doesn’t handle margins inside of a DIV tag correctly. The nested margin jumps past the margin in containing DIV tag and flows underneath the Category box on the left.

Most of this is surely my fault - the text I type here comes out of Word and I just paste it into .TEXT's editor, and the Word generated HTML, especially for code markup, is vicious. However, I took a quick look at the code where the margins break and I don't see anything immediately wrong that wasn't done a few lines above <g>.

I spent a bit of time trying to fix this, which is not exactly fun given the funky way that .TEXT defines its layout. Basically the menu on the left is set up as a DIV tag with Absolute positioning while the center view is set up as plain text sitting inside of a DIV tag that has a margin attached to it. IE has no problems with this but FireFox pukes on the text that contains text-margin:0px inside of it.

I tried to fix this by sticking a table around the body, which fixes the original problem, but brings up further problems with FireFox. IE wraps long single word lines (like hyperlinks) automatically while FireFox does not. The result is that you now have a document that only fits half way onto the screen – clearly this is even worse. In addition, using a table causes FireFox to try to render the entire table before displaying anything which is pretty damn slow (gotta stop writing such lengthy entries <g>). I suspect this is the main reason the .TEXT template uses DIV tags in the first place…

The funny thing is that IE renders fine in all situations I tried. FireFox renders badly in all of them. Hmmm…

If anybody has any ideas I’d love to get this fixed but it’s late and I’m out of ideas.