Page centered in Firefox, left aligned in IE?

One, you’re using a fixed width which will not “squish” the window when “shrunk”. But that’s a design choice. I can’t stand them, IMHO. I believe in using your screen real estate.

As for the hack, if I remember right, the hack has to go like this:

/* Start Hide from non-IE/Win */
* html #page {
margin-left:20%;
}
/* End Hide from non-IE/Win */

Not the back slash in the first line. That’s part of the trick.

Using margin:20px auto; may also be your culprit. I’m not an expert in this, but MSIE doesn’t respond well without specifics. I’d try some experiments with margin: 0px 25% or margin: 0px 50px instead of auto (remove the hack first to make sure) and see if that helps any.

Let us know!

And then set the width?

No it wont. Its the text-align: left; causing it.

Try playing with

body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
text-align: center;
}

#container {
text-align: left;
margin: auto;
width: 760px;
}

Where “container” is the ID of the div containing your content. As you’ll notice, you’ll have to reset the text alignment for “container” (or the divs it contains) or all text will center.

The reason that your having the problems aligning your layout in IE
is due to the fact that you have a comment in the html before the DTD , there must be nothing before the DTD otherwise it switches IE into ‘Quirks Mode’ and IE will not follow CSS rules fully, in this case it does not understand the use of margin:0 auto; it’s important to render in ‘Standards Mode’ for full compatibility with the CSS specs.

Once in standards mode margin auto will work on the wrapper/container for the page and you can then use the text-align:center; on the body and text-align:left; on the first child element to fix things for IE5 which doesn’t render in standards mode and understand margin:auto;.

The use of the hacks that you have are not needed and actualy are not hiding from everything but IE, the escape hack \*/ hides from IEMac to feed a rule to IE only it’s best to use the star selector hack * html #somediv{}

Hugo.

I don’t have comments before the DTD and I still have the same problem as satoshi… can something else cause this? and how do I actually go into standard mode instead of the Quirks mode?

http://sites.neeweb.com/smarties

For browsers to switch into ‘Standards Mode’ you need a complete DTD, that is one which has a full url to the doc spec location.

The one you have at present is a 4.01 transitional without url so you are in ‘Quirks Mode’ which is strange as WP out of the box validates to a xhtml 1.0 DTD what I also do not understand is why your using frames ? a rather outdated and disparaged method which I guess would also require the use of the html 4.01 frameset DTD to be valid.

Hugo.