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MAJOR PROBLEM
When I try to open my website in Mozila it is terrible. Text and graphics are all over the place. How can i avoid this? and how can i check to see this is not happening in other browsers?
I am using microsoft publisher, and the website is perfect in Internet Explorer.
TIA
2) Always included a full Doctype on the very first line of the HTML document. This will cause IE 6 and later to go into "standards" mode to render the box model as described by the W3C specifications. Unfortunately, there is no clean "fix" for prier version of IE.
3) Use Firefox as your primary "testing" browser. This is because Firefox is less tolerant of errors and you can more readily spot problems with Firefox long before you can spot them, if ever, in IE.
4) Validate your markup every so often using the W3C's validators.
5) Learn HTML and CSS. There is just no substitute for a basic knowledge in both. Armed with such knowledge, you are more likely to get WYSIWYG editors, like FrontPage, to produce cleaner, more portable markup.
If I still need to use publisher, how can I fix the formatting so that it works correctly in all browsers?
By following the five steps outlined above. No-one's suggestion that you can't use Publisher, but unless you can understand and adjust the generated markup, it's highly unlikely that you'll ever achieve any consistency between browsers.
When you think about it, most of a web-page is expressed in non-visible structures and attributes. Two given pieces of text might look the same, but if they are classified differently in the markup, a small change might radically alter the document's appearance in unexpected ways. Microsoft Word handles styles using concepts similar to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and in my experience it confuses the hell out of users unless they understand the principles behind it.
Once upon a time, when I worked on a site whose content I received as printed documents from various sources, I used to paste text (captured by OCR) into Microsoft FrontPage to get the basic markup in place, edit it to correct OCR errors, and then switch to viewing the markup to apply styles and structure. FrontPage simplified content reviewing, but it wasn't a substitute for directly editing the HTML as the page came together.
To summarize: Publisher will serve its purpose as a way of putting together content, but will be quite inadequate for making web-pages unless used with extreme care. You need to understand more than you see on the screen.
