page margins

how NN and IE handle page margins

page 1 of 4

page 1
• setting css page margins
• introducing a table
page 2
• using a full-width table
• centering the table
• centering out of p tags
• the unpredictable nn
page 3
• setting margins with p tags
• introducing another table
• centering the new table
page 4
• hard coding margins
• centering with hard coded margins

setting css page margins

Below is the code for setting page margins via stylesheets. I have included the style definition for a paragraph. I am coloring the paragraph and the body of the page for the sake of our examples.

body {margin-left:15%;margin-right:15%;
background:pink;}
p {background:gold;}

The text in the example is a collection of simple paragraphs, each wrapped in an open and closed P tag. In the browsers we see:

we see in NN4.7:	we see in IE5.0:
we see in NN6.0:

The rendering is almost identical. Of course, NN4.7 only colors directly behind the text, and not the full width of the P tag, but we expected that. We can see that all browsers are showing page margins on the left and right. We haven't constrained the P tags with any width; the width of the paragraph elements is being determined by the BODY width.

introducing a table

Let's introduce a small, one cell table, the kind used for making a box with some kind of important information in it to which you wish to draw a reader's attention. The code for the table is below. You can see that the table is aligned to the left. We want the paragraph text to flow around the table. The table goes between the P tags of the second paragraph.

	<table border="1" bgcolor="#FF0000" 
		width="30%" cellpadding="0" 
		cellspacing="0"
		align="left">
	<tr><td>hi, here's some important<br>
		information for you</td></tr>
	</table>

In the browsers we see:

we see in NN4.7:	we see in IE5.0:
we see in NN6.0:

NN4.7 has completely collapsed trying to align the table. It not only has lost the formatting information for the P tag that the table is in, but has lost the BODY formatting information for the paragraph that follows.