I finished part one of the lab and it seemed that all the tables, lists, and text were lined up the way i wanted them to be. However, when i went home and checked out my page on Internet Explorer the layout was different. Actually the table with my picture was elongated vertically. Why did this happen? is it just because of the different browsers? How do i fix this?

Also, can i use an image as the background for my page instead of the color tag? And when putting text and tables on top of the image, do i have to create different lables?

I forgot to mention that the image i want as a background would be inside a large table which held smaller tables...

Let me start with the general advice. It is the case that different browsers interpret HTML differently. I took my own specifications of the tables and tried them with both browsers and there were some differences. This isn't good. One would certainly like to minimize these differences. On the other hand, it isn't necessarily bad. Logical markup and all that nonsense says you shouldn't be worrying about exact positioning.

On the other hand, if two browser produce significantly different views of an HTML page it can be a warning of problems. When you make an error in an HTML file, a browser doesn't try to display an error message. Instead, it just does its best to guess what you meant. It is in guessing that IE and Navigator are likely to show the most differences. So, if you notice a big change in a page from one browser to another, you should double check the HTML for correctness.


Now for the specific advice. I took a look at your tables page with both browsers, and I can report that your variations don't fall in the "normal" category. When I looked at your tables with both IE and Navigator, I noticed that IE seemed to put an extra column in on the left side of the table (a big enough column that the list describing one of your tables fit in it without overlapping with the other table). This made me suspect that you had some sort of not quite correct cell in the table specification. I took a look at the source and found that there is a cell specified in the very beginning of the first row with no row-span to carry it into the second row. All the other cells in that row have ROWSPAN=2 specified and in the next row, everything is ROWSPAN=1 by default. So, the table you have created is out of whack in the sense that the number of columns is not the same in all rows. So, I'm afraid you have a bit more work to do on that table.

As for the background question, you can specify an image to use as a background using the "BACKGROUND" attribute of the BODY tag. Did you want the background just inside the table? If so, you can put the BACKGROUND attributed in the table tag (although this isn't quite HTML 3.2 anymore).