Mac Woes....

Egads what's the matter...

[Gibble]

My site looks perfect on PC, in IE and Opera.

Sent the URL to a few people, one being a Mac user and it is absolutely HORRID.

They tried every browser, IE, Safari, Opera, Mozilla, etc...

It looked like rubish in them all.

It validates to XHTML Strict and the CSS validates as well.

I'm guessing that the reason for the complete lack of support in Mac is perhaps the css float attribute, but I'm not sure.

Any ideas what could be causing the problems.

Of course I can't post a URL so it's a tad tricky to explain.

But on a mac all my divs just keep ending up farther and farther right, rather than staying neatly arranged in the browsers window.

[DrDoc]

Does the parent container (in which the floated divs live) have any restraints as far as width goes?

[Gibble]

Yes, it's set to 100%

[DrDoc]

You said that it looked horrible in all browsers on the Mac...
Did you test in Mozilla on your PC? And, which version of Opera where you testing in?

[Gibble]

v7 opera on PC

I believe the latest on Mac as well...

I'll change my profile to have the link to the site in question...

[synotic]

Well, the first thing I would do is remove the XML prolog ("<?xml version="1.0"?>") from the top of your HTML files. The xml prolog will put IE 6 into quirks mode which totally invalidates your strict XHTML doctype. So what's probably happening is that you've coded just for IE 6's broken box model and now other browsers are correctly displaying it and using your values... but the values are incorrect. That's just my guess though

Also none of those browsers are exactly "Mac browsers" with the exception of ie 5:mac. Opera and Mozilla are both available for PC and Safari is based on KHTML which was originally for Linux. And they support float just fine :)

[Gibble]

The XML defenition <?xml version="1.0"?> should be there from what I can tell from the w3 site...that or they have all their XHTML wrong.

And if Opera for the Mac and PC is the same why does it work perfect on PC and not at all on Mac, they have to be using something that's different.

[grahamstewart]

synotic is correct. The XML prolog will put IE into 'Quirks Mode'.

For IE to be in Standards Mode the very first thing in the document must be a full doctype (one that includes a URL).

W3C says:

In browsers such as Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and others, with or without the XML declaration, a page served with a DOCTYPE declaration will be rendered in standards mode.

With Internet Explorer, however, if anything appears before the DOCTYPE declaration the page is rendered in quirks mode...

...you will have to add workarounds to your CSS to overcome the differences, or omit the XML declaration.

...

We assume that, because of its tendency to cause Internet Explorer to render in quirks mode, some people prefer not to use the XML declaration for XHTML served as text/html.

- from [w3.org...]

[synotic]

And if Opera for the Mac and PC is the same why does it work perfect on PC and not at all on Mac, they have to be using something that's different.

I'm not as informed when it comes to how Opera has everything set up... but what are the respective versions of Opera on each platform? From what I can see on Opera.com, the latest version for Mac OS is Opera 6.03... for Windows it's 7.23. The latest Opera may attempt to copy IE's use of Quirks mode due to the presence of an xml prolog in attempt to have greater compatibility... but again I wouldn't really know.

Also, just to check, I removed your xml prolog and it correctly displays incorrectly in IE 6 because it is now rendering in standards mode. When you're coding your site, make sure to check how it displays in Mozilla's Firefox [mozilla.org], available for free, as well at the same time.