Club needs help with mixed up table display

[Randy Brook]

My sea kayak club converted an Excel spreadsheet listing our trips to
a page on our web site. The first time you look at it using IE6, many
text lines are overwriting other lines. Also, some of the table cells
are stretched vertically.

If you leave the page and come back to it, it displays perfectly. From
then on, as long as you don't clear the IE cache, you can come back to
the page, or go to similar pages on the site, and they will all
display fine. There is never a problem if you enter using Firefox.

This problem has left us frustrated. Even when our members get used to
it, visitors will not understand.

I am hoping some expert could take a quick look at the source code
online and see an obvious problem and solution. Here is the site:
http://www.seattlekayak.org/trips/triplist_06.htm

Thank you.

Note: my email address isn't valid because of a major spam problem
that hit me recently. So an online response would be great. Or you can
find my address at the club by looking at the contacts page on the
website. I am the "Speaker for the Fleet".

 

[Ronx]

There are some very odd (invalid) inline styles in every cell that may
be the cause, but nothing obvious.

I suggest you remove all inline styles from the table cells, and style
them in the header section using an embedded CSS.

Examples of odd styles:
..font8
{color:windowtext; /* What is windowtext? - not a valid colour in
CSS - this will be ignored by all browsers */

style="width: 41; text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;
white-space: normal; color: windowtext; font-size: 12.0pt;
font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none;
font-family: Times New Roman; border-left: medium none; border-right:
..5pt solid windowtext; border-top: medium none; border-bottom: .5pt
solid windowtext; padding-left: 1px; padding-right: 1px; padding-top:
1px"
This appears in almost every cell - a huge overhead of code. Again,
what is windowtext? The same cell also has attributes x:num (???) and
height="45". Remove the height, which will be determined by the cell
content.

Examples of Odd code

colgroup and col tags are used to define the width of each column as
186, 87, 327, 87 pixels
These are overruled by inline styles that set the column widths to
23, 41, 312, 1 pixels.

<tr style="height: 94.5pt" height="126">
Remove the styles and height. The height of a table row is always the
height of the tallest cell in the row, and every cell in a row is the
same height.

<table style="table-layout: fixed; width: 602; border-collapse:
collapse" cellSpacing="0" cellPadding="0" border="0" x:str
height="4337">
Never seen the attribute x:str before in a HTML page - should be
ignored by all browsers. The table height should also be removed,
this will be determined by the table's content.

<col style="width: 140pt; text-align: left; vertical-align: middle;
white-space: normal" width="186">
width: 140pt; is a printers size, which may or may not be the same
as 186px set by width="186". This could, but shouldn't, confuse the
browser.

<font class="font8"> should be <span class="font8">, with </font
changed to </span>

There is nothing I can see that would directly cause the behaviour
described, which happened for me as well.

 

[iamccw]

check with your hosting service. That is the weirdest thing i ever seen. But
being that it works when you go to the page the second time it probably has
to be a server side error. I personally would not convert the excel file but
i woud create a page in fp using tables and just copy the info from excel
and paste it in fp. if you would like you can send the excel file to me and
i would do it for you. (e-mail address removed)

 

[Randy Brook]

I sent our former webmaster your suggestions. He came out of
retirement to make the following changes. There's still all the extra
code, but this worked and was quick:

_______________________________
1) In Table Properties, I unchecked "Specify height".

2) In Cell Properties, I unchecked "Specify width" and "Specify
height".

I also deleted 11 unused rows at the end of the table.

 

[Randy Brook]

Thanks for your generous offer. With 400 cells in two tables, it would
have been a lot of work. Our former webmaster came out of retirement
and got the display working ok.