Site Structure review

Question

Hi guys, i'm working on a site, using tables with css, still
working on design issues, but at this point am interested in
comments regarding the structure of the site. I do have nested
tables, which depending on the source seems like this can be ok, as
long as it doens't go to far, however i do have one colspan, not
sure if this is serious enough for me to get rid of.
any comments appreciated.
thanks, mike
http://www.connectedelements.com/fish3/index.htm

Answer 1

Hi Mike,
The site breaks badly in Firefox. I suspect it's the colspan
and table height mix.
Table height is invalid HTML and you should get rid of those.
Let the image's dimensions and your other content control
that for you.
Rather than have the horizontal part of the image across the
top take up 3 table cells, one of which is merged, why not put one
larger image in a single <td>?
Essentially, you could have one "big" table that is 1 column
with 3 rows.
In the first row, your big horizontal image.
In the second row, nest a table inside with two columns. The
left column for your navigation and the right column for the
content text.
The 3rd row could be the footer.
If you need to make the height of the middle row taller but
don't have enough content, you have a few options.
You can add a bottom margin to the last element in the column
to push the bottom of the table down, or, make the nested table 3
columns instead of 2 and use the third column to insert a
transparent gif image as a spacer. Make it 1 px wide by "x" pixels
tall.
One other thing you might want to change. You have a CSS
class named .body.
It's not a good idea to use id's and classes with the same
name as html tags.
You could call the big table .container, for example.
Hope that helps.
Tim