Posts by MidiMagic

As much as I hate the hover feature, it seems to be working the way you said you wanted it to in Firefox. Have you tried looking at it in several different browsers?

The problem is probably in the stylesheet, which you did not show us. Have you made the mistake of combining the following attributes in the same class or placing their classes in the same tag?

• width or height attributes
• margins, borders, or paddings
• Absolute object locations

Internet Explorer makes a mess when this happens. It interprets these inside out from how the standard defines them.

I also do not see html tags or a doctype declaration. If both are missing, the browser will go into quirks mode.

Note that Microsoft has no way to tell the distribution copy of your OS is a copy or not. The product code is the only thing they really look at.

But MS may be rejecting ALL attempts to install old versions now, as a greedy trick to make you use the horrid Windows 8.

Antitrust Microsoft for its coersive policies.

The former employer who contacted me had no idea that their files were no longer readable. They are not computer-literate. Also, when I worked there, MS-DOS upgrades did not cause files to become unreadable. Upgrades to MS-DOS did not change the file structure or whether or not a particular version of swoftware would run (except DBase II, which used trickery to copy-protect files that made copy-protected files look like folders to MS-DOS 3.0). Much scientific research was lost because their MS-DOS files could no longer be read.

Until about 5 months ago, I had a working Windows 3.1 machine. I thought I could repair anything on it. But the battery leaked and ate the copper from the circuit board. I have a version of Lotus that would have worked on that computer, but it failed before they contacted me.

I had no way to convert my music files to a more modern machine before the computer died, because the files were in a proprietary format. I have the files on floppy disks, but no software to read the contents.

I have actually started Windows 3.1 on an XP machine, but I can't run the software because the only kind of disk that works on both XP and Win 3.1 is a 1.44 MB floppy. I can't fit Win 3.1, the music program, and a song file onto the same disk at the same time. Win 3.1 doesn't know how to read a new CD-ROM, a new hard disk, or a …

You mean "balls of steal".

Robert...you're joking right? Gee, I didn't know MS stopped updating XP. I guess I should have stated in my post...."MS pulled the plug on XP".

MS has now pulled the plug on everything but 10, effective 4/1/2015. The new CEO is GREEDY!

The only time I ever lost a hard drive is when some stupid DOS "anti-piracy" program on a CD rom wrote back to drive D to make sure the software (a flight simulator) was really on a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, the CD drive was drive E on that machine. It removed the entire root directory on the new larger hard disk in that machine. No software was lost (it was on the C drive), just data, and all of that had been backed up. So the only real loss was the time and trouble of formatting the drive and replacing the directory tree and all of the files.

I sent the CD to the company that made it, broken in half, along with a nasty letter telling them the damage their sleazy idea caused.

Here is the real truth about real-time hardware and operating systems:

A. The company that makes real-time hardware (real-time data collection, process control, or media capture/editing devices) needs the following to be able to produce and sell such a system:

1. Enough installed base of an operating system to be able to sell enough units to make development possible and worthwhile (This is why few products are developed for Linux).

2. Enough time to develop, perfect, and market such a system before that operating system is taken off the market (This is why no products exist for Vista or 8).

3. The OS must also support the other applications the customer needs to analyze or process the data the special device provides. Many times this includes Microsoft Excel using special procedures published in journals for the purpose.

This is why most real-time hardware was developed for DOS 5 and 6, Windows 3, and Windows XP. They stayed around long enough for the development cycle to complete and products to appear on the market.

B. The consumer does not understand that a change in the operating system causes most real-time hardware to malfunction:

1. Any change in the frequency the operating system can access the special hardware is a disaster for the design of the real-time hardware. Often it makes the hardware unusable or greatly reduces its performance (devices made for DOS 5 and 6 with 1/1000 second resolution were downgraded to a 1/9 second resolution under Windows 3.X and 95).

2. The manufacturer of …

Microsoft thinks their downgrades are upgrades. Reality:

XP to Vista - big downgrade
XP to 7 - medium downgrade
XP to 8 - humongous downgrade
Vista to 7 - medium upgrade
Vista to 8 - big downgrade
7 to 8 - humongous downgrade

What is downgraded most is ease of use.

Guess what? The IRS is still using XP, because the development time for a new system is longer than the Windows versions have stayed around.

It should be illegal to discontinue system software just for the purpose of avoiding all of the wasted tax dollars caused by these constant upgrade demands by Microsoft.

Demanding that XP be maintained until everyone is ready to stop using it would be like demanding that Ford motors install airbags in all of their antique vehicles.

It's more like they replaced the road with railroad track, so the old equipment can't use it.

All of that point-of sale equipment was built with a minimal 32 bit on-board dedicated computer that can run XP, but is too small for Vista, 7, 8, or 10. It might even be made with the OS in ROM, as some older equipment was made.

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Another problem is that the normal development time for hardware and software for equipment run by a computer is longer than the time between successive Windows releases.

I have some software designed for Windows 3 (and a computer saved to run just this one piece of software). I actually got a letter from the company telling me why they were going out of business and why there would be no more updates and bug fixes.

They said that they were still developing the release to run on Windows 95 when Microsoft announced Windows 98 (then called Windows 97). The Windows 3 software would not run on Windows 95, and neither version would run on Windows 97. They each required entirely different hardware and software to work at the speed needed to make the application actually work in real time.

They said that they could not possibly develop updates to the hardware and software at the speed …

I really do not care whose products I get, as long as I can get something that I can keep using for the length of a 20-year study.

We did not choose Microsoft because of its properties. We chose the system the lab equipment was originally designed to work with. In 1990, MS-DOS was quite compatible with the equipment, and they sold us computers to use with the equipment.

At that time, computing was not on its mad rush to changing everything every three years. And the company actually sold the equipment with the promise that it could be used for a 20-year study. The company that sold the equipment had no reason to expect that similar computers would not be available as replacements.

The lab equipment we bought in 1990 still works quite well when manually controlled and visually read, but none of the computers it was designed to work with are still available. All of the computers that were originally bought for the purpose failed within 10 years, including the spares bought to ensure a 20 year study. The 20-year study the equipment was purchased for was ended after 10 years because no replacement computers could be found to do the job of operating the equipment.

What happened to that 20-year promise the vendor made? When Microsoft started changing the operating system every 3 years, the company could not keep up. It went out of business.

Now the real question is, how can anyone doing any long-term science …

This is not a matter of how well the software is written or how well the hardware is designed.

It is a matter that Microsoft does not care that its changes to the OS will cause this equipment to malfunction. Microsoft does what Microsoft wants to do.

Often these problems have to do with changes in the timing of the operating system. When DOS was replaced by Windows, almost all of the old real-time hardware was rendered obsolete. Microsoft changed how the OS used the 55ms jiffy timer:

Under MS-DOS, the OS used maybe one millisecond of computer time, and then immediately handed the processor back to the one user application in use. This was the ideal for hardware data acquisition and control (the only better case was the one operating system I know that completely shut down while the application was running - it had no jiffy counter).

Under Windows 3, the OS took an entire 55ms time slice for its own use. This made all of the hardware designed for MS-DOS obsolete, because such hardware expected the application to have control most of the time. The hardware could be accessed only once every 110 ms under Windows, ruining its usefulness.

The developers of Windows told us to use hardware that puts time stamps on the data, recording in the data packet the exact time the event occurred, so it can be sorted out later. But how do you put a time stamp on an outgoing signal telling the …

It is fixed for one display size. Computers with other monitor resolutions may not display it properly.

Everyone kept telling us to make table-less columns. I researched why. It is because readers for the blind give the table row and column coordinates.

The problem with using div tags for columns is that it falls apart when the screen resolution changes enough that the content is wider than the screen, or way narrower than the screen. With monitors ranging from widescreen high-res ones to the early LCD ones with 640 X 480 resolution.

There are two ways to get around this:

1. Go ahead. Use tables. The w3c didn't provide a reliable replacement for the table for this purpose. Their main call for not using tables was the use of tables to make margins and borders. They did provide reliable replacements for the table for that purpose.

2. Use the div tag with the display styles table-row and table-cell. It works in many (but not all) cases. But it does not work on some old browsers, and some reader programs call them tables.

Do you think you can still get parts to repair your old 8-track cassette deck? Or any cassette deck?

If I bought an 8-track tape and no newer verion of that recording is available, I want the ability to still hear that album. I paid for the royalty right to hear those songs in perpetuity when I bought the album. You want to take that album away from me.

And if I spent thousands of dollars on expensive lab or studio equipment that can easily last 20 or 30 years, it should not be prematurely lost because Microsoft wants to make money by changing the operating system all the time.

How long do you expect car manufacturers to keep supporting old vehicles? Do you expect to go into a parts store and get a carburator for a '59 ford sedan? Would you expect to find seatbelts and airbags on a 50 year old vintage auto? Or anti-lock brakes?

But what Microsoft is doing is changing the road so nobody can drive the old vehicle. They have effectively replaced the road with railroad tracks.

The old vehicle is the equivalent of the scientific or music studio equipment, not the computer.

Like it or not, Windows XP just does not support the advanced security that is built into modern operating systems and it is unreasonable to expect Microsoft to waste any more effort on shoehorning in patch after patch to try to keep Windows XP secure.

"but yea, MS redid the kernal entirely with Vista, and forwarded the improved upon failures to 7 with a new shell."

This means that any real-time software (software that controls and reads external equipment in real time) will NOT work. Every time the OS kernel is changed, the real-time part of the software must be rewritten to work with the new kernel.

I have worked with real-time software for over 30 years, amnd have had the same problem every time Microsoft changed the operating system.

• I was actually able to use the same software during all of the DOS years. It bypassed the operating system and accessed the ports directly. But you can't do that with a time-sharing OS.

• Every time MS changed Windows, the system timing changed enough that the software vendor had to issue a new version so we could continue using the same hardware. We had to buy the new version each time. There was no9 "update" because the main system of the software had to be totally redone.

• Now the new computers will not take the hardware we have.

Most real-time vendors do not offer versions that work with any kind of Unix-based OS, because there are not enough customers to justify writing yet another version for that.

Several vendors of real-time software have gone out of business because they could not keep up with Microsoft's changes.

I am "hanging on" because of the enormous expense to replace the hardware and software of my real-time system and the loss of my current data if I change.

Replacing the OS means replacing the computer. Replacing the computer means replacing the interface cards, because the new computers don't take these cards. The software will have to be replaced too. And my existing files becone useless, because the new software uses a different file format.

And if a security issue develops because I am still running XP on the internet, it is greedy Microsoft's fault.

Microsoft is greedy, because they want us to spend the money to upgrade, so they discontinue support to force that. But they are thinking of business users, not science or studio users with lots of real-time hardware and software that must be replaced if the OS changes.

This is the problem with intellectual property. Too many judges favor the owners of intellectual property over others who come up with similar products or names. This is giving too many entities monopoly powers.

Nobody should be able to own any word that is in the dictionary.

I got it to work, but I have to use the DOS screen. This means that I have to do the bacvkups myself, because others can't just click and do it.

The command is:

xcopy j:/*.* k: /e /q /-y

"In the Start screen (the one with all the icons) the icon in the lower-left corner is named "Desktop". when you click that your computer will look just like Windows 7, but without the Start menu in the taskbar. In that window you can easily switch between applications just like you do now with XP, and you can do the same thing with windows 7."

It did not do that for me.

And I can't use ny legacy software with 7. They took out support for the devices I need.

"If I bought a new Car, but I forgot how to unlock and open the Door, I cannot drive the Car to work. If Billions of commercial Users have to be 'retrained' in order to keep on doing today what they have been doing 'til yesterday, all Those Employers have a great big problem, a time problem as well as a huge financial problem."

If they keep moving the door locks to weird positions on the car (such as under the headlights) each time you have the car serviced, the idiot who desgined the car should be fired.

The way Microsoft keeps changing the software, it is like having to change to a different kind of vehicle to be able to travel, the way our application soiftware and peripheral devices are left behind by Microsoft.

The next upgrade will require us to replace our cars with trolleys. The following one will require us to replace those …

A postscript:

Windows 2.0 and Windows 8 are the only operating systems I have ever seen that are less useful than MS-Dos.

They are blocking them for several reasons:

1. To keep you from wasting time on the job.

2. To keep you from inadvertently or vertently revealing company secrets.

3. To keep their internet bill lower. Those sites eat up bandwidth.

Anyone can read the javascript source code from the web page, and figure out the password.

Another Y2K coming is IPv6.

I will tell you why XP is still my operating system. I have used 7 at work, and it is much worse:

1. I love the XP paint program. I hate the one that comes with 7. I want pure physics colors, not artist colors. And I want straight lines without dithering. It won't let me have the color palette I want. I want line art, not a photo painter.

2. I would have to buy a new computer to upgrade, so there is a much larger upgrade cost. My RAM max is 1 GB. Vista and 7 use most of that for the OS. It's a scam between Intel and Microsoft to sell more computers and operating system copies than are needed.

3. The windows look awful in 7. I like the sharp windows of XP, not the ghostly 7 ones.

4. The search tool will not search the entire computer for a mismoused file. I have to search by top level folder.

5. I hate the tab grouping on the taskbar.

6. At times, Windows 7 takes hours for updates. If I boot needing the computer in a hurry, I can't have it.

7. I have legacy real-time software that needs the XP driver setup. It won't run on a newer OS.

8. I do not want touch screen capabilities I never would use.

You certainly can. That is as secure as having a guard snail on duty.

This happens for only one reason: Something in the chain of transmission is too busy to keep up with the video:

- If this is a live webcam, more people might be accessing the site. The site then can't keep up with serving all of the users now using it. You can't do anything about this unless you own the site.

- The Internet Service Provider (ISP) serving that site may be overloaded. You can't do anything about that either.

Note: If this site fails, but other sites behave normally, at least one of the above two causes is true.

- Your ISP may be overloaded. You could change ISPs.

- Your computer might be overloaded. You can do the following:

1. Make sure you have enough RAM.
2. Close all other windows.
3. Stop such processes as alarm clocks and reminders.
4. Use your fastest disk for the download buffer.

The only way to completely remove vocals from a recording without damaging other parts is to have the original multitrack recording the recording studio had when it recorded the song. But they aren't going to let you have access to that (If it's your song, that's different).

Or you can buy a karaoke version of the song, if it is offered.

What those vocal-removing machines or programs do is phase-cancel anything panned to where the vocals in the song are. But this has some serious drawbacks:

1. Anything else panned to the same location is also removed. Since the vocals are usually panned to center, and the kick and snare drums are also usually panned to center, the vocal remover removes them too.

2. If there is any distortion in the recording, the vocal (and the snare and kick) will leak through, especially in the higher frequencies, as a buzzing or tinny sound.

3. If the reverb of the vocal is panned elsewhere, it won't be removed.

4. Parts that are panned near to the vocal in the original recording will be diminished, compared to the parts that are panned farther away from the vocal. So the instrument balance shifts, favoring the harmony instruments usually panned wide over the melody instruments usually panned close to the vocal.

5. The resulting recording is always mono.

6. The data compression techniques used to make small mp3 files may prevent such devices or software from …

It could be that the server doesn't know how to use a .pptx file yet. Or it might not know to serve some auxillary file.

Did you use some built in file in the presentation, but forget to upload it? Missing parts can make corrupt downloads.

Note that the client computer has to actually have Office 2007 to play the .pptx file, or it must have a compatibility package for Office 2003 installed.

I would not yet use .pptx files on web pages. There are too few people with Office 2007 at this time.

That's experience.

There are two kinds of css failure:
1. The css has errors in it that prevent correct rendering.
2. The css renders, but not the way the page creator wants.

1. Look for the following css errors if the css does not render:
- Look for typogoofical errors first.
- On Firefox, use the error console. It will tell you the line containing any syntax error.
- Make sure you spelled the classes and ids the same in all references.
- Make sure you didn't use the same name for two different classes or ids.
- Make sure you didn't use an id twice.
- Make sure that there are no units of measure on 0 values. Some browsers do not allow them.
- No special characters in classes and ids.
- Beware of deprecated and browser-specific styles and properties.

2. Look for the following if the css does not render the way desired:
- Remember that the surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) are rendered OUTSIDE any box object. Leave enough space for them to fit.
- If something intended for the same row renders below the row, it probably does not fit in the remaining space.
- Don't put size styles (width, height), and surrounding styles in the same style or tag. This is the key to inter-browser compatibility.
- Is the div shrinking, instead of containing the contents? Use the style: display: …

You don't have to use different stylesheets for different browsers. I get stuff to work just fine with only one.

The following rules make pages work with all browsers:

- Don't use deprecated tags and attributes.

- Don't use browser-specific tags.

- Make all HTML tags lowercase.

- Be aware that Internet Explorer renders box objects in a different way, compared to other browsers. Don't put nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, width) in the same tag or style that contains size styles (width, height).

- Make all attributes, values, styles, ids, and classes lowercase.

- Don't tangle tag pairs. Each pair of opening and closing tags must be entirely inside, or entirely outside, every other tag pair in the document.

- Place all attribute values in quotes.

- Don't put line breaks within attribute values.

- Close containing tags with separate closing tags.

- Close empty tags with self-closing tags. Put a space before the / mark. This is necessary to get Internet Explorer to work correctly with closed empty tags.

- Don't use comments to hide scripts or styles from browsers. They cause trouble.

- If you can do so, use styles instead of tables to create columns.

- Don't use tables to create margins, borders, or padding. Use tables to create tabular data.

- Set text alignment styles for tables. The defaults are different for different browsers.

- Write your urls and …

You are designing for the quirks mode of the browsers without the doctype. If you are in quirks mode, the browsers do weird things.

Standard mode puts the surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) OUTSIDE the width and height declarations, so you have to leave extra space for them.

Don't use pixels and points. Use percents and em, so the page is compatible with multiple screen resolutions.

It really can't be done in a way that works on all browsers. The web was designed so that you do not know what size the browser window is, and with no way to fit something exactly to the browser window. The page is supposed to flow to fit the existing space.

For width, you can simply use the width function with the appropriate percentages for what you want. You can use percent to change the sizes of images too. Use relative sizes, so all of the parts expand and contract at the same proportions.

Adjustments for the height of the browser window are not provided in a way that works on all browsers and computers. The best way to do it is to treat the web page as a scroll, not a sheet of paper. The Internet is not designed to treat information as sheets of paper.

Or use Adobe Acrobat to play the page. It can do this, because you can resize to fit..

Because most people open their browsers maximized, design the page to work on a standard browser aspect ratio. Make sure the background color is compatible, so if any background shows below the content, it is not obtrusive. If the page renders taller than the browser window, scrolling is a fact of life.

Remember that the new 16x9 monitors are throwing monkey wrenches into this.

If this is an assignment from a superior, you have the dubious task of …

It's the fact that a playing movie usually expects to be on top, combined with the fact that the dropdown does not render until it activates.

We need some limits on what ads can do:

- They must not use up all of the CPU time.*
- They must not do anything when the mouse rolls over them.*
- They must not scroll the screen to show the ad.
- They must not hide the insertion point.
- They must not freeze the mouse.
- They must not expand to cover other parts of the page.
- They must not make sounds.
- They must not prevent navigation.
- They must not advertise anything a child should not see.

And here is a lost of things I would prefer that ads not do:

- No animation. It's extremely distracting.
- No blinking text.
- Any link should be a visible link, not the entire ad.
- Following the link must not destroy the browser history.*

* This should be true for all websites, not just ads.

How about writing on how designers have to waste time rewriting web pages that used to work, because the software makers and the W3C keep changing the standards.

It's just like the forced change to DTV that everyone hates. The clowns in charge can't leave the standards alone.

I had the same trouble.

My printer knows it can't print that close to the edge of the paper, so it won't do it.

Telling the printer that the paper is a different size just moves the definition of the bottom of the page. But the software still wants to put the border too close to the new bottom. The printer still thinks the border is too close to the edge.

Most Lexmark printers have this problem, because the rollers let go of the paper before the printhead gets that low on it.

Do this:

- Go into the page layout dialog box and set the bottom border higher.

- Go into the Page Borders dialog box and make the border you want. Then, before leaving the dialog box, use the Options button.

- In the new dialog box, select to measure from the edge of the text, rather than the edge of the paper.

- Click OK for each dialog box.

I tested this on Word 2003 and 2007. I have no earlier version of Word.

Of course, this might result:

Languages spoken:
xhtml, css, perl, pascal, FORTRAN, Visual Basic, C, ...

(English not listed)

Do you mean as in how Microsoft Word marks perfectly good grammar as bad, because it picks the wrong word to use as the verb?

I have never seen a grammar program that works right.

I have also never seen a spelling program that knows all of the words.

Get rid of this absurd idea.

But be careful. If you pat yourself on the back too hard, you will fall off the pedestal you put yourself on. :icon_mrgreen:

The xml line is not necessary, and causes errors on some browsers.

Look for styles containing both a size style (width, height) and a nonzero surrounding style (margin,. border, padding). These can make things wider than 100 percent, causing the column to go down.

Look for anything wider than the page.

Check the page for W3C validation.

Tips:

- Don't use pixels for anything other than border size.

- Use % measures for sizes and positions relative to the width of the browser.

- Use em measures for sizes relative to the browser font size.

There is now a reason to use tables and css for layout, instead of divs and css.

Employers now prefer the table method. Our technical school instructors are now teaching this, instead of div and css.

Why?

Job performance!

It takes an average of four times as long to create a page using divs and css, compared to using tables and css. This is because the page author must fool around with the div settings until it works. The table always works the first time.

The employer prefers getting more pages per day, as opposed to getting pages that please the W3C.

Simple div structures work, but if the structure contains a list or a table, div messes it up. Then you have to play with height, width, margin, border, padding, and other properties, just to get the structure to hold together in all browsers.

As an example, I wanted to create a simple structure consisting of text on the left and a small table on the right, all surrounded by a border. I tried the following in sequence:

Making a surrounding div for the border:
- I could not get the table to go to the right and stay inside the border.
- It wanted to put the table under the text instead.

Make a surrounding div for the border, with two divs inside:
- The div for the border became small vertically, with both the text …

0px is an invalid style. Place units of measure on nonzero values that need them. Do not place units of measure on zero values. It causes some browsers to throw the entire style away.

This is one place where absolute positioning and pixel sizing fail miserably.

If you use size styles (width, height) in the same tag or style that contains nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, padding), it causes Internet Explorer to do this kind of thing, with a different result in Firefox.

The search function is totally useless.

I am searching for an old post I made on fixing a problem with Firefox overlapping images with tables placed below them. The solution was in the post. But the search function will not find the post.

Instead, it is finding posts that have only one of the keywords I put, instead of requiring that all of the keywords be present.

One page could then contain a link to the other, in a place where it is seen immediately.

Actually, I don't wrote for mobile devices, because I wish that every one of them would be crushed by bulldozers. People should not have access to such devices while behind the wheel, and those devices are the reason we are losing analog TV.

My variations on your 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website

1. DO NOT resize the user’s browser window, EVER. (I agree. It's a cheap substitute for designing for variable sizes, and can mess up someone's settings needed for other purposes.)

2. If your website requires the visitor to load your home page, and then “launch” your real website in a pop up, YOU LOSE. (Anything in a popup never gets to my browser. I swat them like flies!)

3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE. (You also lose if you don't ask, because the user who can't use either the highest resolution you use, or the scripts to make the choice, can't see it at all. Load the low res page, and provide a link to the high res one.)

4. If your website is ALL Flash, FIRE your web development company. (Many people can't download the player due to college or employer restrictions. And animation is extremely annoying, unless it teaches something.)

5. DO …

I found two the validation service won't find:

1. You have an 0px style value in your p tag style. This is invalid in Firefox, and causes the entire p tag style to be thrown away. There may be more of these.

2. You have size styles (width, height), and nonzero surrounding styles (margin, border, padding) in the same style or on the same tag. This causes size and placement errors, because IE wrongly nests them in the wrong order. FF and other browsers place the surrounding styles outside the defined size styles, as the W3C specifies. IE crams them inside the size styles.

The trick is to not use nonzero surrounding styles and size styles in the same tag. Nest two tags, with one style in each.

You have invalid code that causes FF to throw out the style it is in.

Zero values in styles must NOT have units of measures. Your 0px entries cause the style it is in to be thrown away by the browser:

Yes: 0
No: 0px, 0pt, 0in, 0%, 0em, etc

Both the center tag and the align= parameter are deprecated. They will stop working sometime in the near future, when HTML 4 is no longer supported. They do not work at all in XHTML now. Please don't give obsolete solutions.

There are two things going on here:

1. For some strange reason, the W3C does not want us to center anything but text. I think they are thinking in terms of books and newspapers, as opposed to homepages and advertising. No easy way to center anything else was provided, other than styles involving automatic margins or a clear on both sides.

2. IE doesn't follow the rules. Even when you apply the correct styles, IE doesn't understand what you wanted. But adding a style to center text alignment also makes the others work.

Don't specify sizes in pixels except for images. Using pixels for the sizes of other objects keeps the page from being compatible with various screen resolutions.

Don't use tables to create non-tabular structures, unless nothing else can be made to work. The table is not deprecated, but the use listed in the post above is an abuse.

The solution in the post above also has tangled tags, and will not pass W3C validation.

The problem is that most software developers set prices as though businesses are the only customers. Individuals can't afford those prices.