IE6 Right hand White space?

Probably simple, IE6 is 'shrinking' 100% tables on initial page view

[Thadiun]

Okay everyone, I may be 'blinkered' to the answer to this one and I will truly accept a kicking if the answer's simple:

In IE6 I have noticed that my sites are developing a vertical white space on the right. Its not a majorly serious thing, just aesthetically annoying to me!

It only happens on the initial visit to a page, if you refresh then the white right-hand border vanishes.

I also spotted the same space affecting the fetch game in Lycos (found at [fetch.lycos.co.uk...] when you go through to play the game the top banner does not stretch as it should)

The situation seems to affect pages which have a table 100% width.

Can anyone out there let me know whether:
a) Its an IE6 thing
b) My machine is just playing silly buggers and no one else on the planet can see this
c) I am being intensely stupid and there's a simple remedy

As a footnote, an example of what I am rambling on about is at [n21internet.com...] and the lycos url above.
These sites appear fine on first load in IE5 and netscape - thus me wondering about IE6.

Best regards to you all
Paul

[mack]

I am having this problem also. on this machine I have a 15" monitor. all looks well (the url's given by the previous poster also render well) in my screen size. But when i view some of my pages in a 17" monitor the problems arise.

I am using 100% tables, why do I still see this white space to the right?

[tedster]

Thadiun, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I'm not seeing the problem here, but I am sure you're seeing something that would be good to pin down. My screen is set for 1024 pixels width and I'm using IE 6.02 on Win 98 right now.

To keep this discussion clear, let's understand that the physical dimension of the screen is irrelevant this issue (i.e., 15 inch or 17 inch or 21 inch doesn't matter). But the settings for the screen - that is the monitor resolution in pixels (800x600, 1024x768, etc.) IS one of the variables to notice

[Thadiun]

Thanks for the replies - at least I have the feeling I'm not alone! :)

An issue with different resolutions? Hmmm.....

No joy...just tried changing resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768, then loaded the offending page

Still a white gap on the right.
I just find it strange that it appears on the initial load of a page - if you hit refresh the table jumps to the proper full 100% width filling the screen - in both resolutions listed above.

Just for a little added clarity I have Internet Exploder 6.0.2600

Time to patch/update? ;)

Are there other people on higher version IE's experiencing this snaglet?

Regards
Paul

[edited by: Thadiun at 8:18 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2002]

[Thadiun]

oh, forgot to ask if people could check it out in higher resolutions too - higher than 1024x768

I apologise for any naff appearances in the design itself in advance but I targetted 800x600 primarily with 1024x768 as the top range.

Regs,
Paul

[edited by: tedster at 5:45 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2002]
[edit reason] edit sig [/edit]

[pageoneresults]

If you are using style sheets, wouldn't this help alleviate the problem...

body{margin:0px;padding:0px;}

Doesn't this have something to do with allowing space for a vertical scrollbar when it appears?

I'm using IE6.0.2800.1106 on Win98 and I do not see the gap at right that you are referring to.

[piskie]

I am seeing no problem either first load, refresh or ctrl+refresh.

I am running dual monitors 1280x1024 & 1024x768 and I tried it on both.

I have XP Pro fully updated and
IE6.0.2800.1106.xpsp1.020828-1920

How have you set your page/body margins?

[andreasfriedrich]

I´m experiencing a somewhat related problem in IE6. One site I created about two years ago uses a complex table layout. The outermost table is set to width=100%. When a page from this site is reloaded via Ctrl-F5 and the source code actually changed, a vertical scrollbar is displayed and the page is about 20 pixel wider than the browser window. On subsequent and first visists without a forced reload everything is fine.

Andreas

[Thadiun]

Intriguing.

Actually, you mentioning the scrollbar on the right made me stop and think a moment.

The gap on the right is roughly equal to the width of the scrollbar.

So its as if, when loading the page which is set to margin 0 that IE6 makes an allowance for the scrollbar within the actual browser window (further to the one thats there).

Heck, I might be just blowing in the wind here - I dunno.

I'm currently about to test previous suggestions on pagemargin settings, so I'll post the results.

However if someone has come across this anomaly which I, and a few other people, suffer from - and have the answer please post.

regards
Paul

[WebGuerrilla]

My copy of IE does the same thing. It is extremely annoying. Anytime I visit a liquid site, I always have to hit refresh once to make the gap dissappear

[keyplyr]

By not using a DOC TYPE with the URI to W3C, Explorer will (may) render the page in quirks mode and, depending what other non-standard code is used on the page, will (may) display oddly.

Solution: Install DTD and Validate

I also found this out the hard way :)

[amanda21]

I've just run an experiment on this and have discovered the following:

If you have a javascript tag in the first line after the body tag or above, the problem goes away, at least it does on my pc.

The tag can be empty, ie <script language="javascript"></script>

No idea why this is so, but it works so I really don't care ;)

[Thadiun]

AHA!

Thanks Mandy - you're a genius as always.

(SideNote: Amanda is my better half so I may be a little biased ;) )

I have just entered the < script language="javascript" > and closing tag on the page(s) and the white gap has completely vanished!

I hope this thread has aided others with the same snaglet as me - best wishes to you all and keep up the good work with this forum guys & gals - its invaluable! :)

Regards
Paul

[pageoneresults]

Hmmm, interesting find! Since I have external javascript calls for all of my pages due to rollover effects, I would have never caught this.

[SuzyUK]

well solved you two! ;)

I've been following this thread, but was unable to replicate the error...

Suzy
:)

[Thadiun]

Hi SuzyUK,

Yes that has intrigued me greatly - some can see it, others cannot.

I have to say I took a little confidence in the fact that the Lycos game mentioned in the first message of this thread boasted the same 'white gap' that was afflicting my site - and they have a little more money than me to plonk into web development ;)

I was starting to consider that it may be my PC & setup somehow, but it also happens on Amanda's PC - but not on the third machine here which is running win98SE and IE5.

As we're both running win98SE and IE6 (the version listed further up this thread) and our PCs are different breeds - I began to consider the facts and wondered whether the problem was localised to an IE6 trait.

Hence me posting here in an area filled with gurus, techies and generally knowledgeable bods.

(*grin* Trust the answer to pop up from ten foot away from me after I had bared all in a forum eh?)

I am still curious as to why some can see and some can not.
Maybe as stated before its a quirk, something that is *so rare* in a micros*ft product (sarcasm on overload)

I hope the combined wills and thoughts of posters here will lead us to the answer - until then, the javascript thingy works just fine and I'm a happy little bunny.

Best regards
Paul

[tedster]

Amanda, I'm very curious how you tracked down that script tag workaround. I would never have even considered it.

I guess that the mysteries of "how" it works are buried deep in the compiled IE code

[Thadiun]

Hi Tedster,

Amanda spends hours coding PHP, ASP and Javascript on sites and possessed a very methodical and logical approach to troubleshooting and problem solving - plus quite a chunk of knowledge.

I will ask her to post in here tomorrow if there was a glaring pointer to it.

Regards
Paul

[Crazy_Fool]

i see the same vertical gap on some sites with IE6 as well. having looked briefly at the code for a number of sites, i'm not convinced it's a DTD problem - some sites without DTDs show ok, others don't. www.ibm.com has a DTD although it may be non-standard.

i'm not convinced that adding <script> tags will always clear it either. i have sites that display fine without <script> tags and those that still display wrongly with them.

i'm gonna keep on looking and see if i can find something else that might cause the errors.

[amanda21]

The script tag method may not work on all browsers/platforms, I am using IE 6.0.26 on a pc.

I have been experimenting a little more and discovered:

1. The tag needn't be a script tag, <xml></xml> has the same effect (i'm thinking that anything that forces the browser to drop out of html mode will work).
2. The tag must be before the first <tr> tag of the 100% table (ie before the browser starts to write the table contents).

I also tried putting rightmargin="0" into the body tag, this worked.

I guess that without the rightmargin set the browser initially assumes a default rightmargin width and then resets it to match the leftmargin after the page has been written, or after it drops out of html to process scripts.

This would also explain the problem disappearing when you hit refresh, the browser is essentially presenting a semi-cached version of the page.

[amanda21]

Sorry Tedster, forgot to say how I found it.

It wasn't exactly blinding inspiration, I just took a page with a 100% table that wasn't showing the problem and stripped it tag by tag until the problem appeared.

When I took out the script tag the problem appeared, nothing else I removed had any effect.

[tedster]

The sane, methodical approach. Something I almost never think of trying!

[lorax]

IE 6 SP1 is known to have bugs so I wouldn't be suprized to learn that's all you're experiencing. I recently built a XHTML compliant (validated) page with CSS2 div controls and IE6 blew up the format even though it looked fine in IE5.5, Op6 and NN6.2. $&#& M$. You'd think they'd be able to at least be consistently bad rather than make something worse.