I'm a web designer who codes by hand in CSS/HTML/JS. A relative of mine recently designed a site with Dreamweaver (http://www.marblevalleyschool.org/home2.htm). He dropped me a message asking about why his site looks so bad in IE. I waded through the html and the css a bit, and honestly, I can barely tell what the hell is going on. I'm not asking anybody to comb through all of the html, but when you look at the site in IE (6,7,8) all of the navigation just collapses completely. Is anybody aware of any idiosyncrasies in dreamweaver that would cause a site to look like this? I mean granted, dreamweaver dropped a fair portion of the html into tables, but I can't see anything totally obvious that would cause the site to look like that in IE. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

First thing to do is VALIDATE it. There are a number of errors and invalid coding there, like the <p> inside a <li> - not acceptable.

The validator is also squawking about invalidly nested lists and a missing </div>, which may be related.

He's using transparent PNG's with no PNGFix, which you gotta have for IE6, 7 & 8 should display them properly. He needs some conditional comments in there to feed IE6 and 7 the necessary rules to make it behave correctly. IE8 SHOULD be closer to Firefox in the way it's rendered.

As for the collapsed tabs, he has no dimensions defined for the images he's using for the tabs, and no width set in his css either. The width doesn't have to be in the css, but it DOES need to be in the HTML.

I'd start there. Obviously getting rid of the tables would be a plus too.

He also has multiple div's with the same ID. Classes can be used multiple times on a page, but ID's need to be unique.

<div id="top"></div>

Well, that's where I'll start. Dreamweaver really makes a mess!

Thanks a lot for your help, by the way!

Dreamweaver really makes a mess!

Oh yes, it CAN and DOES - especially in the hands of newbies who don't know how to code. It's a great TOOL once you DO know, but IMO not a good tool for beginners.

Originally Posted by pika

ladynred ,you are the specialist,so great

pika - you trying to bump up your post count or what?

Originally Posted by lottscarson

Well, that's where I'll start. Dreamweaver really makes a mess!

Dreamweaver means a world to me (and millions of web developers). Hope you haven't discovered the best features of dreamweaver still now.
Infact, the entire Adobe Creative Suite is best package ever discovered by web and web based application developers.