Unnecessary (?) <div> tags

Re-doing a year-old site, can't remember why I added some of this stuff

[MatthewHSE]

I'm doing a major re-design of a site that I last worked on about a year ago. I'm finding lots of <div style="width: 100%;"> tags that don't seem necessary to me, but I know I knew enough a year ago that I wouldn't have added those tags without a reason.

They're all enclosing tables that were set (with CSS) to be 100% width. It's a CSS-based layout. I seem to remember IE5 doing funny things with 100% tables that a 100% div fixed, but I can't seem to duplicate it now or even remember any details.

So does anyone know why I may have thought those extra div's were necessary or advisable? I know there was a reason - now I just need to decide if the reason is still good enough to leave the things in! ;)

Thanks,

Matthew

[tedster]

I used to do this (enclose tables in divs) to get NS4 to behave in some cases -- if I remember correctly, some inheritance factors were completely broken for tables unless they were nested in a div.

One of the things I've been lousy at is leaving myself notes when I do some kludge based on a specific browser. Recently there were some Safari work-arounds that I accidentally removed because I couldn't remember why I wrote that goofy code -- only to have complaints come rolling in soon after I changed things.

[moltar]

I think sometimes it can be used to push out the floats. Though

<div>

is 100% width by default. I like to use

<hr />

for cases like that (where makes sense semantically).