IE 6 not wrapping text right in table

[sbrooks]

Hi all.... I've got issues! (I'm assuming I've messed up my code whether its the css or just the table codes).

I've got a table within a cell of a table and in PC Explorer versions (6 is the one that seems to be the trouble), the table shows the text as not wrapping. It just runs on forever until the next hard return. The table is set to 97% of the window.

What did I do wrong? I sure would appreciate any help if possible. It's a new design of an online newsletter and I've got clients who can't see it correctly.

I'd include an example of the code, but I don't know where the problem lies.

Other info... I'm designing on a Mac. The digital newsletter shows up okay in Mac and PC Netscape versions as well as Mac IE versions. It's just IE 6.o or so that isn't showing up correctly. Unfortunately, that's about 90 or so percent of my audience.

I don't even know where to start in terms of what I'm looking for, thus me posting without searching much on this list. I apologize for that. Thanks in advance for your help. What have I done!

[edited by: tedster at 7:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2004]

[tedster]

It sounds like you may have been bitten by some of the irregularities in IE's "quirks mode". In short, IE6 has two ways for rendering pages. One is standards compliant (or a close attempt anyway) and one is called "quirks mode", which emulates many non-standard rendering quirks in earlier versions.

Only a full DTD, including the URL, will put IE into standards mode. The W3C has a list of the full DTD's here:

[w3.org...]

Beyond that possibility, line wrapping will vary from browser to browser. It's just a fact of life. So we can't create layouts that depend on the way one set of browsers wrap text, we need to leave some flexibility in the layout, or do very vigilant testing in many, many browsers to be sure our layout doesn't break.

I prefer the flexible layout approach in most cases.