if you look @ http://84.30.32.166/eadtu_conf2005/

my first effort to get away from table design
so far so good, but one problem

there's a menu on the left that contains a div with the id "menu"
inside the div is a unordered list with 12 links containing rollovers

viewing with mozilla / firefox browser the menu displays like i want to, all tied up together

in internet explorer there is a unwanted 2-3 px space between each image

what am i doing wrong? or is there a hack for this?

switched back to table for the menu
due to time restriction
but i'm happy to find out a method how to get this to work
in internet explorer without tables

As far as I know the only way to get around that whitespace bug in IE is to put all the markup on one non-breaking line. That is, remove all the line breaks and extra space between the[list], <li>, </li> and </ul> tags. That's an easy hack to stomach if you can output it with a server side language. For instance, if I were using PHP on the server I could do something like this:

echo "[list]".
          "<li><a href='#'>link</a></li>".
          "<li><a href='#'>link</a></li>".
          "<li><a href='#'>link</a></li>".
          "<li><a href='#'>link</a></li>".
          "<li><a href='#'>link</a></li>".
     "</ul>\n";

I can still read the code in the source file, but in the browser when I view the source, it looks like this:
[list]<li><a href='#'>link</a></li><li><a href='#'>link</a></li><li><a href='#'>link</a></li><li><a href='#'>link</a></li><li><a href='#'>link</a></li></ul>

And there is no extra whitespace in IE.

I've also had some success with applying a display: inline; declaration to the <li> elements, but that hack can have other nasty repercussions, depending on the layout.

HTH!

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

i tried that now, but still no luck
check here:
http://84.30.32.166/eadtu_conf2005/default_wrox.htm

Really? I'm looking at it in IE6 and it looks identical to the output I see in FF.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

hmmm

display: inline; worked for me

but what are the nasty repercussions then? or could be?

Well if you don't see any repercussions, then there aren't any. Because an inline box is totally different from a block box (the <li> default), sometimes applying display: inline; will really mess up the design. If it works though, go with it!

If that first hack didn't work, it could be because of the images. I just remembered having loads of trouble eliminating that white space bug when there were images present. I beleive I ended up using <div>s in a similar design to get around that.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

something went wrong
overwrote the local version of my css file with that of my server version

i lost my tableless menu settings

building it again:

http://84.30.32.166/eadtu_conf2005/default2.htm
http://84.30.32.166/eadtu_conf2005/css/eadtu.css
http://84.30.32.166/eadtu_conf2005/css/menu.css

but again same problem
already did as suggested before, but no change
so i must be overlooking something else this time, any idea?

I haven't looked at the update yet, but one thought:

Don't forget that IE can be sticky with files. By that I mean that even after an update to a file sometimes it won't read the update unless you force it to (by clearing the cache, or sometimes even stoping and restarting IE, or sometimes even restarting the whole computer!).

HTH!

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

Here's another IE trick that I'm fond of when others fail.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type='text/css'>
li {
    margin: -1px 0;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->

This stretches the top and bottom by 1 pixel but does nothing to the left and right. It also appears in conditional comments, so only IE sees it.

I didn't see the display: inline; in the style sheet. Did that not work? I didn't look very closely either, just glanced at it.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design