Very often after I am done doing my part and transfered all the  web files  to the client , I receive an email/ phone call a day or so later inquiring why  some pages jump in web browser.

The very first thing the client blames is the current web browser s/he is using, and why not? Then after opening all the major web browsers at his disposition he realizes the issue remains the same on all browsers.

Now, may be I am the one who screwed up!
Nope!!

In all cases it’s because web pages have different amount of content some longer than others. When a web page is long enough to exceed the web browser’s height  then a vertical scroll bar appears.  If on the other hand the web page only has a small amount of copy, everything is shown above the fold and no vertical scroll bar is needed by the web browser.

Cause :
When using a fixed width layout with the left and right margins set to auto on your main container (#wrapper) , your web pages will be horizontally centered. The horizontal position of your web page depends on  the available width in your web browser viewport.

Let’s assume your browser window is 1024 pixels wide and that you have set your page layout to a fixed width of 980 pixels to be horizontally centered.

• If a page copy is concise  the entire page can be shorter than your browser window’s height. In this case no vertical scroll bar is necessary. You web page will therefore have a left and right margin of roughly (1024-980)/2, that is about 22 pixels on each side.
• Now left assume another web page has a lot of text copy. In this case the page height to exceeds the web browser’s window height. A vertical scrollbar appears therefore cutting down on the width of the browser’s viewport.
  The width of the scrollbar is about 20 pixels, so we are now left with only 1004 px (pixels).

  Using the same formulas as above (1004-980)/2, yields 12 pixels for the left and right margin for this web page. That’s what creates a 10px horizontal shift to the left when you navigate from short (no vertical scrollbar) to a longer page where the vertical scrollbar is required.

Solution:
To solve the issue we are facing the solution is to force the web browser to display the vertical scrollbar on every page no matter how much content there is in there.

1. - Option 1
   Using the ‘min-height” CSS property to  set a minimum height of your main container to match that maximum browser window height of your target audience.

   The problem is you do not yet  have that information yet you review your web analytics after your site went live.

   However from a personal experience, I found that setting the min-height to 1000px will generally do the trick. The only hiccup is the  ”min-height” CSS property is not understood by IE6. Therefore users using that version of  Internet Explorer will experience the horizontal page  shift.

2. - Option 2
   Add a just  enough line breaks (Shift+Enter) or empty paragraphs (Enter) after the content on pages with less copy.

Choose whichever option is more suitable to your  design and target audience.
I’ll go for option 2 for the time being until IE6 disappears from the web landscape.

Does it really matter if a web page shift just a few pixels. For most people, it doesn’t. heck, most site visitors will even notice or be bothered by it.

But it’s a great deal for digital artists. Graphic designers are a different breed. A graphic designer will “fight you” tooth and nail for 1 pixel and for a good reason. That doesn’t mean visual artists are very difficult people to work with, on the contrary. They just thrive for perfection.

It’s up to the web designer/developer to make sure the web site displays or degrades gracefully on all major web browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, IE8). Reaching that goal seems daunting if not impossible.

How can one make all those web browsers get along?

For years now web developers have been pointing the accusatory finger to Internet Explorer: J’ACCUSE!!

Well, a few years back Netscape 4 was sitting on the trial bench, accused of slowing down the web. These days, all eyes are on IE6 . Internet Explorer 6 does not support most of the new HTML & CSS features which take web page design to the next level: CSS round corners, PNG graphics, and the CSS :hover pseudo-selector is limited to the anchor tag.

Those are just a few of the potholes along a winding road. The need to make websites display well on all major browsers, despite all the shortfalls mentioned earlier, puts a brake on how far a web designer/developer can push the envelope. More and more time is spent on a given project tweaking and “hacking the code” to be compatible with IE6 and others. And that “my friends” can not only be a real nightmare for the web designer, it’s a big impediment to the evolution of the web.

Since you will have to include IE6 anyway in the list a web browsers to check your website again, here are a few nuggets to save you tremendous web development time and frustration. At any stage in your web design process (HTML/CSS):

• Avoid applying padding to main CSS layout containers (div tags) at all cost
• Use margins in the nested container to simulate the left and right padding on the closest parent container.
• Wrap the text in paragraph (<p>) tags to which you applying margins to achieve the padding.
• IE6 doubles the margin of the floated element on the direction of the floating (left or right)
• Always specify a width of any floated HTML element
• Apply both the float and inline display properties to list items of your horizontal navigation
• If you must hack, create a separate CSS style sheet where you would group all the styles aimed at IE6 and use the Internet Explorer’s conditional comments.

At the end of the day/project, web development is all about matching the capabilities of the end-user’s web browser. It’s less about the artistic talent of the graphic artist or the programming skills of the web programmer.

“This web site is best viewed in web browser X or Y” is just an excuse to avoid spending extra time checking your design compatibility with other major web browsers. It might seem cost effective at first but it does not make business sense: you are loosing potential customers user web browsers different than your target browser.

All you need is to preview your site design at crucial steps during the web development process to fix potential problems early on. In the end you will achieve a design that will accurately display your website on all major web browsers. It may also be time to target smartphones as well.

IE6 is still here and breathing. We just have to deal with it.

You just devoted  hours creating a pixel-precision CSS layout,  tweaked and tested it on various web browsers. It all looks good and works perfectly even in IE6.  You now have a  template you can use to create your web pages.  You start adding content, preview  that web page in a browser and surprise, oh surprise, your nicely crafted layout is now out of control.

What happened? More likely mismatched <div>, <p> or <span>,… tags!!

Without proper comments to indicate where each main container tag is closed in the HTML markup, it can be challenging and painful to “hunt” the source of this layout issue. Because you now have so many nested  tags, you would have to look into your HTML markup line by line to match each opening and closing tag. And if you happen to miss just one of them, you will have to start all over again from the “<body>” tag down.

Let’s just take a look at this typical  markup within a body of an HTML document:

<div id=”wrapper”><div id=”header”>Header content goes here </div><div id=”maincontent”><div id=”content”> Page content goes here</div><div id=”sidebar”> Sidebar Navigation</div></div><div id=”footer”> Footer Content goes here</div></div>

It looks clean and is self-explanatory. However once you start  to copy & paste content in the different containers  and add new blocks , matching tags becomes a daunting task. That’s because each container can wrap smaller containers through a nesting process that can go on and on. It’s hard to tell which closing “</div>” corresponds to which opening “<div …>”.

That’s why you need to always comments your HTML markup before you start adding content. For instance the markup shown above would be properly commented as follow:

<div id=”wrapper”>
<div id=”header”>Header content goes here </div><!–  end header –>
<div id=”maincontent”>
<div id=”content”> Page content goes here</div><!–  end content –>
<div id=”sidebar”> Sidebar Navigation</div><!– end sidebar –>
</div><!– end maincontent –>
<div id=”footer”> Footer Content goes here</div><!– end footer –>
</div><!– end wrapper –>

The portions “<!– … –>” are HTML comments. The will never be displayed by a web browser when placed in your HTML markup.
So the tips I would like to share with you based on my daily experience are:

• Comments helps you annotate your markup for future reference.
• Add an HTML comment right after the closing tag “</div>” tag of each main container.
• Commenting your HTML code help you set reference point where each HTML tags is closed.
• HTML comments  helps you  isolate  each block and quickly fix a CSS  layout issue.

To add a background color that covers the entire web browser’s viewport,  set a background  property to the HTML body tag:
body {
background-color: #333333 ;
}
That create dark grey background color (#333333).
Applying a background color to the body tag  add more contrast between  your web page content and the remainder of the screen particularly with fixed width CSS layouts.  In general, using a CSS background color is the easiest way to “colorize” a given block of content without adding much to your web page download time.

You can also add a background image to your web page body using the CSS style.
body {
background-image: url(images/bgbody.gif) ;
}
The url parameter defines the relative path to the graphic used as a background image.
That file’s path can be absolute (i.e. http://livetrainingsession.com/images/bgbody.gif  or /images/bgbody.gif) or relative to the location the CSS style as show above.
Feel free to copy and paste that absolute path nto your web browser’s address bar to see the actual background image.

In this instance the web page uses a very small graphic made of dark-grey patterns. You can see that tiling bleeding through the left and right edges of this web page if your display width is greater than 980 pixels.

You can  simultaneously apply the background color and the background image to the body tag as well. You would write the CSS style as follow:
body {
background-color: #333333 ;
background-image: url(images/bgbody.gif) ;
}

or use a more compact,  shorthand version:
body {
background: #333333  url(images/bgbody.gif) ;
}

or even more compact:
body {
background: #333  url(images/bgbody.gif) ;
}

In this example, the background color is written in its compact form (#333). An hexadecimal value  made of three pairs of identical values (33) can be replaced by just three values (333), one for each pair. Hence “#999999″ could be replace by “#999″ and the color “#FFFFFF” can be written “#FFF”.

It’s always a good idea to use a background color in conjunction with a background image. The web browser covers the “viewport” with the background color while downloading the background graphic. It’s not only for aesthetic but to avoid the visitor having to stare an empty white screen while the web page is loading.

It’s worth mentioning the background image is always displayed on top of the background color whenever the two are applied to the same HTML element. And it does not matter in which order they are defined.

No matter how complex your website layout appears to be, you will for sure find the CSS layout that matches your design’s wireframes including the typical main containers such as the header, navigation bar and page content area. Smaller elements can then be wrapped by those main blocks.

Those Dreamweaver CSS layouts are cross-browser compatible therefore saving you time and the frustration of having to test your layout again all popular web browsers. All you need is make a few easy tweaks from the Dreamweaver CSS panel to update the dimensions, background styles and you can start adding your design elements.