Okay, let me explain the problem. I'm trying to work on a threads board called the
The Senate and I'd like to have two images of columns appear on either side of the board. The problem is, the middle portion of the columns
must lenghten and shorten as the contents of the middle portion of the page lenghten and shorten. This is critical because if I set the table cell, where the middle part of the column is configured as a background image, to a fixed height they don't expand and contract, they will either force the page to be too tall (i.e. if the middle content is short) or there will be gaps in the images of the columns because the content is too tall.
I've successfully been able to get it to work in Netscape 7.01 and Mozilla; however, for reasons beyond my understanding, the same code does
not yield the same results in Internet Exploder. I've tried different settings all to no avail. The middle part of the column is a background image. Since the height of the top and bottom portions of the column are set to a fixed amount (i.e. 58 pixels) the middle portion "should" lenghten and shorten to accomodate the content. Internet Exploder doesn't seem to want to recognize the fixed height of the top and bottom cells and in its infinite wisdom, it stretches those cells out resulting in the rather large gaps you see.
So, my question is, is there a way to make this work in Internet Exploder? If you're interested in taking a look, just do a view source on the page and you'll see the code.
I experimented with frames, but unfortunately that doesn't work. The bottom frame can't be below the viewable window and hence you end up scrolling the middle frame, where the content is, which is REALLY ugly. The solution is going to have to come from tables which is how it's configured at the moment.
I know that the background attribute of the <td> tag isn't XHTML 1.0 compatible, but I don't know of another way to have something lenghten and shorten like I need it to while retaining the same look.
Take a look at the page using Netscape and you'll see the difference.
Any suggestions?