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List:       sqwebmail
Subject:    Re: [sqwebmail] sqwebmail html problems as rendered by IE 5.0
From:       Jesse Guardiani <jesse () wingnet ! net>
Date:       2003-01-31 16:54:39
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IMHO, it would be nice to see these changes incorporated into the distro.

Especially if they don't hinder viewing from other browsers.

Sam? What do you think? 


On Thursday 30 January 2003 23:20, Kurt Bigler wrote:
> Using sqwebmail-3.3.1, I discovered some problems with the webmail
> rendering in Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh.  There were no problems
> with other browsers that I know of, but a lot of people I know are using
> this browser. I made some experimental changes (more detail below) to the
> sqwebmail html templates which appear to have fixed the problem, without
> causing any problems in other browsers that I have tested.
>
> The problem seen in IE 5.0 is that the round corner gray or light blue gifs
> do not join seamlessly with the other table cells having a matching
> background color.
>
> The solution requires around 9 individual changes per affected html
> template file.  At least this is true for folders.html, the template for
> the "Folders" page.
>
> There is a curious thing which occurs in these files, and perhaps there is
> some reason for it that someone can fill me in on.  In quite a few places
> there are some non-printing characters between a <td> and the corresponding
> </td>.  These characters trigger about half of the problems I was seeing in
> IE with the alignment of the round corners.  The characters appear in vi as
> "\xa0" (quotes mine) a display of 4 characters used to indicate the single
> character.  I take it this is a character with hexadecimal value a0, which
> would be like a space, but with the high bit set.  Apparently the presence
> of these characters causes the cell height of the middle-top and
> middle-bottom table cells to take on the height of the font currently in
> effect, which in this case turns out to be taller than the round-corner
> gifs.
>
> Removing these characters eliminates the vertical aspect of the
> round-corner alignment problem.  This takes care of all the problems in the
> upper gray table area which appears on most pages.
>
> The lower light blue table area also has a horizontal problem which is
> apparently caused by IE getting confused about the colspan="3" which is
> used in the middle row of the bottom table.  It is easy enough to work
> around this problem by eliminating the colspan (or changing it to 1) and
> adding two new empty cells for the narrow columns to the left and right of
> the previouly colspan 3 cell.  This change eliminates the horizontal aspect
> of the round-corner alignment that appears in the light blue area.
>
> The first change of eliminating the extra characters between <td> and </td>
> seems highly advisable in any case, from what I can tell, but please inform
> me if you know more.  For example O'Reilly's Web Design in a Nutshell in
> Chapter 10, page 188 has this to say:
>
>     Returns and spaces with <td>s
>
>     The problem most often lites within the cell (<td>) tag.  Some
>     browsers will render any extra space within a <td> tag, such as
>     a character space or a line return, as white space in the table.
>
> The chracter in question actually appears to behave as a space on the Mac.
> I did not check what kind of space it is.
>
> The second change, involving eliminating the colspan, also does not have
> any adverse consequences that I can see.  It is slightly less efficient in
> use of horizontal space, this does not appear to be a problem.  At least in
> most cases the contents of the blue area do not require up a lot of
> horizontal space.  The change has the result of increasing the margin
> around the content.  To me this change is actually an improvement even in
> browsers that do not have the alignment problem.
>
> There are other places where the "\xa0" characters appear but cause no
> problem.
>
> As an example, here is the output of diff for the changes I made.  I might
> have eliminated some <td> spaces that were not actually causing a problem,
> but I think that at most 2 of the changes might be extraneous.  Note that
> the "\xa0" characters appear (at least to me) as spaces here:
>
> 47c47
> <       <td bgcolor="#cccccc"> </td>
> ---
>
> >       <td bgcolor="#cccccc"></td>
>
> 53c53
> <       <td> </td>
> ---
>
> >       <td></td>
>
> 65c65
> <       <td> </td>
> ---
>
> >       <td></td>
>
> 70c70
> <       <td bgcolor="#cccccc"> </td>
> ---
>
> >       <td bgcolor="#cccccc"></td>
>
> 144c144
> <         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" valign="middle" width="100%"> </td>
> ---
>
> >         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" valign="middle" width="100%"></td>
>
> 150c150,151
> <         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" colspan="3" valign="middle">
> ---
>
> >         <td bgcolor="#99ccff"></td>
> >         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" colspan="1" valign="middle">
>
> 248a250
>
> >         <td bgcolor="#99ccff"></td>
>
> 253c255
> <         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" valign="middle"> </td>
> ---
>
> >         <td bgcolor="#99ccff" valign="middle"></td>
>
> I hope this information is of some use.  If these changes are good idea, it
> would be nice if they could make it into a future version of sqwebmail.  It
> did not take me very long to make these changes in my template files, maybe
> an hour.  The patterns are almost identical everywhere they occur:  the
> space between <td> and </td> and the colspan="3".
>
> Regards,
> Kurt Bigler

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
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