Pages not displaying properly in IE

Pages look OK in other browsers, not IE

[larueski]

I'm relatively new to web design and I've designed my site in Dreamweaver, previewing in Opera because my experience has been that pages that look right in IE are glitchy in Opera. I thought if I previewed in Opera, they would look OK in IE. Not so much. Simple things like the table borders just look wrong, and cells are stretched out or constricted for no apparent reason; columns are all wonky. Everything looks fine in both Opera and Netscape. Only IE does this.

I'm going crazy. How do I fix this?

[tedster]

Welcome to the forum, larueski. The best place to start is to make sure your HTML is valid. You can't automatically trust DreamWeaver!

W3C Validator [validator.w3.org]

After that step, dealing with individual browser oddities is a lot easier. Each browser has its own unique way of doing error recovery. But if you have no errors, then there is no error recovery happening and the issues are a lot easier to see and address.

<edited to fix the link>

[edited by: tedster at 12:12 am (utc) on Nov. 2, 2004]

[larueski]

Thanks, Tedster

OK, the link didn't work but I found the W3C validator. Now I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed! My reason for using Dreamweaver was so that I didn't have to be immediately proficient in HTML; unfortunately, now it looks as though I still need to be... but I'm not! Yikes!

I'm very confused, because when I look at the HTML IN Dreamweaver, the attributes that the Validator lists as missing seem to be there.

How do I know how to correct these errors without taking an emergency overnight class in HTML? :-)

[tedster]

Sometimes errors cascade, and fixing one at the top also eliminates many of the following errors. Assuming you have only used a recent DreamWeaver, the code should not be all that terrible. We are mostly looking for errors that have to do with table structure, but it might also be things like missing quotes or angle brackets.

I understand you are in a "triage" situation, but there really is nothing for it but wading into the HTML waters, at least a little bit.

What's the first error you can't decipher?