From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2006 - 07:08:56 CDT
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
>>I'm having some rendering problems with the <h4> headings starting
>>in Section 4 (with IE7 Beta 3 on Windows XP Home), but the text is
>>certainly all there.
>
> As far as I can tell this is an issue involving a .css file I don't
> own. Will look into it.
From what I have seen, IE7 has a strange rendering behavior for the legacy (non-standard) <center> element, which partly worked as an inline element, or as a block element, and don't seem to respect the layout of other standard elements (notably those that including some extra margins, borders, or padding).
The <center> element seems to ignore the margins, padding and positioning when it computes the central position, but then the alignment position is offseted with the other CSS options, and both are added, causing text to be positioned sometimes outside the of the rendering rectangle computed with CSS rules.
Also the effect of <center> is too broad: it impacts also blocks within it that specify other text alignment properties, and it breaks the style hierarchy. Its effect on lists and quoted blocks is desastrous, as well as on texts or images that are explicitly aligned to the right by CSS or standard HTML4 attributes of standard elements.
The solution: remove <center></center> from your legacy pages, and use <div align="center"></div> which is correctly described in HTML, or use CSS to produce centered text, or use the valign attribute for table cells.
i do think that the few browsers that don't recognize <div align="center"> but only <center>are now extremely rare and very old (even those few Netscape 3 or NCSA Mosaic are no more supported since long, and have known some updates that supported div's), or they are some plain-text onoly browsers that can't even honor margins, borders and padding (so in that case there's no real difference in them between <center> and centered <div>'s).
This is the most frequent layout problem I see, and forgetting <center> is certainly the best solution as there's alsways another working way to produce the same effect. <center> is absent from XHTML, and its support will probably disappear, to favor the better standard-compliant support of CSS. May be some time, browsers will consider <center> to be aliases for <div align="center"> and will even make this element invisible from DOM, or it will be completely ignored including in CSS selectors.
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