Static Page Length

I viewed your page just now using Mozzila and it displayed fine.

Eric, I tried doing that and it sort of works. If you go to the link I posted before both of the /div’s work but it doesn’t extend the page. It just writes end of footer after my writing and end of rap at the end of my menu and doesn’t fill in the rest.

You’ve got two lines in your code saying div id=”rap”, try getting rid of the second one. Basically the number of opening div tags should always match the number of closing ones.
Also, get rid of the “COMMENT”s, these were meant for your benefit, not to appear on the actual page.
Hope this helps.
Also, taking some time to improve your HTML is always a good idea. If you click on the “XHTML1.0” button on your page it will tell you what needs tightening up. It may look a bit daunting at first but it’s really worth it. Once your HTML is mostly good this automatic validator becomes a really useful tool to help you iron out the occasional mistake.

Sorry to sounds like a complete idiot but I almost have it fixed up. The code on that page is almost all valid but there is still a problem. I think I am missing an </div> somewhere but I don’t know where and then I think the page will look right. Whenever I try to add a </div> where I think it might go the page will get all messed up again. Could someone please look at the code for the page and tell me what I am missing? Thanks.
https://www.jagsfan.net/contact.php

Aahh.. sorry, I forgot to say… same thing happened to me and I eventually fixed it by swapping the “menu” and “content” blocks around in the index.php file, i.e. everything from <div id="menu"> to the corresponding </div> goes before <div id="content">, instead of after like now. This is probably not the most elegant solution, I don’t even know why it works but it does. I’ve tested it in Firefox, IE and Netscape.
I’d be interested to hear of more elegant solutions if you or anyone else find one (to recap: 2-column layout with content on left and menu on right, each in a div, currently the only way I can get them side by side is by listing the menu div before the content div in the HTML – otherwise menu moves below the content). Any pointers appreciated…

Well now. Here we are into the heart of CSS positioning and some of the issues involved in even a simple two column layout. First of all I congratulate you for abandoning the CSS2 absolute positioning scheme in the default layout. What then? Many of us will not contemplate putting our menu before the content. Why? It is not accessible, or semantic. Plus it involves a serious reordering of index php. Of more immediate use to us – it screws our search engine rankings.
The recommended solution in these circumstances was, as I understand it, first proposed by Zeldman. The solution is to float the content left, and the menu right. That model is set out at the
noodleincident with considerable clarity.

Yeah, if you care about search engines, you want your content first, before the menu stuff.
-d

Ah, the infamous voice-family hack! I read about it before but it confused me too much. This simple demo is much clearer, so thanks for the link! I’ll give this a try soon.
The only thing that still confuses me is that the problem occurs in Firefox 0.8 – IE would not surprise me but I thought Firefox was standards compliant?

Ugh. The voice-family thing never worked for me, at least not in IE5. See my layout file at UrbanMonastery.com. It’s adapted from Typepad’s 3-column layouts, though you can just use two if you want.

Well Firefox is standards compliant but a floated element is taken out of the normal document flow. Just because it looks a mess doesn’t mean its not correct. It normally means we haven’t marked it up right.

Thanks for the tip about the “rap” div – I didn’t know what that was for, and I had this problem reappear on a new site today. I probably took the rap div out; I’ll check again.
I think it also helps if you include this line:
overflow:hidden;
in your column divs. Six Apart always does that, though I’m not sure what it does.
Justin