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The 800x600 table trick that saved my whole layout
Back in 1997 I was rebuilding my band's site and kept having the side menu drift all over in Netscape. Found out if I wrapped everything in a single table set to exactly 800 pixels wide with a fixed left column of 150, it stayed put on most monitors. Spent a week fiddling with layers before that, now I feel dumb for not trying tables sooner. Anyone else stick to tables long after CSS got popular?
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campbell.nora1mo ago
Remember that table trick actually came from a quirk in how browsers handled the box model back then. If you set a table cell to 150 pixels, the padding got subtracted from that number in one browser but added in the other, so your menu would creep sideways by exactly the padding amount. Netscape and IE were fighting over who got to define "width" and the table just quietly picked a winner. That is why your 800 wide grid snapped into place while all your layer experiments kept sliding. You were not being dumb, you were accidentally using the one element both browsers already agreed on.
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