Firefox vs. Internet Explorer HELP!!!

[TLH Solutions]

I picked up a new client that has a current website that looks great in Internet Explorer but the Navigation bar looks messed up in Firefox. Unfortunately this website has been edited by a couple of different companies so i'm not sure where to start to fix this problem. Help please!
The website is www.hccf.cc

~Kandis

[deathshadow]

Warning, my 'reviews' of what's wrong with a site can be a bit harsh. I am NOT trying to be 'mean' or offensive - I am stating things as I see them. I don't rap, I don't jive, and I certainly am not going to slip the rose coloured glasses over your eyes, pat you on the back and lie to you. No throwing silver bullet fixes at it here - that's akin to putting a band-aid on the leaky dike.

So, what's "wrong" with this page?

1) 49 validation errors.

2) script before the doctype. Welcome to IE6 being in quirks mode and kiss off any chance of getting it to behave the same across multiple browsers without following all sorts of oddball rules and diving knee-deep in hack country.

3) microsoft office rubbish in the header

4) inlined CSS

5) inlined Javascript

6) that stupid malfing adobe/dreamweaver mm_swap javascript rubbish. It was a bad idea a decade ago, it has no place in a website coded after 2001. PERIOD.

7) table for elements that don't need tables.

8) absolute positioning for major layout elements

9) inlined presentation in the markup

10) multiple nested tables on a page that even if one used tables for layout doesn't need more than ONE.

I could go on and on for pages here, I think you get the idea.

There's a formula I use to determine how well coded a website is, which is included in my own 'style guide'

1k+content*1.5+200 bytes per content image.

Your page only as 2.4k of copy (copy is the print term for just the text content of a page) with four non-presentational images (in that rotating view) - a well coded version of that page (at least for markup) should be under 6k - WORST CASE I'd say 9k... you have 27k in your HTML file, a sure sign of "throw it out and start over"

Because to "fix" this page to work properly across all modern browsers (and I'm seeing all sorts of oddball render errors) I would have to throw it all out and start over from scratch - using this thing called "Minimalist Semantic Markup".

Frankly, I smell a WYSIWYG at work - do yourself a favor and pitch WHATEVER tool you are using in the trash be it dreamweaver, that new M$ one whatever the **** they are calling it - go get yourself a REAL text editor (Notepad++, EditPlus, Win32pad, Crimson) and do it 'properly' - and TEST in each browser as you go. (Now that we can test Safari under windows, there's no excuse anymore)

Oh, and is there any reason that the url for a place in Indiana would have a domain name that says it's in Cocos Islands, Australia?

[Dan Schulz]

He said the site belongs to a client, Jason.

[deathshadow]

He said the site belongs to a client, Jason.

Well then, where to start is to throw it all out and start over from scratch - there's nothing there worth salvaging.

[HostV]

Sometimes firefox/ie = tricky, but Opera and IE5v6v7 is even trickier :\

[deathshadow]

Sometimes firefox/ie = tricky, but Opera and IE5v6v7 is even trickier :\

On what planet? 99% of the time IF there's a problem between FF and Opera/Safari, the problem is incomplete or missing parts of the spec in FF... and frankly it does NOT take a lot of effort to get a page working Opera/FF/Safari/IE7. You might occasionally have to throw haslayout at 7, or use a different technique alltogether, but it's not a big deal.

Only 5 & 6 are a real problem.

There's a reason Presto and Webkit pass Acid2 and gecko browsers do not (I love how they broke it again in the FF 3.1 daily builds too). Hell, they're still struggling with bugs and missing parts of their implementation of HTML 2 that can trace it's lineage to Netscape in 1998. (bugzilla #915 for example)