Drawing on the Web

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I’ve run into two problems that were fine in IE6, in Firefox and Opera, but that display poorly in IE7.

First, the <center> tag.

Yes, it has been deprecated for a while in favor of a <div align=”center”>. And, then, current recommendations call for creating a enclosing <div>and applying margin:auto or margin-right:auto; margin-left:auto.

But, this gets rather hairy very quickly.

With IE6, the easiest way to center a page was to use a <center /> tags. Firefox and Opera went along quietly and all was well, until IE7 came along.

Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t like <center> tags, at least with the combinations of DIVs I was using on my www.TerrysComputerTips.com site.

Although my pages are fixed now (by removing the <center> and </center> tags), IE7 initially took this same beautifully centered page — and right-aligned the DIV at a page width of about 1400 pixels.

Where it got that number, I don’t know. Idenfifying the problem was easy.

Identifying the solution wasn’t — who would have thought that removing the <center> and </center> tags would make the page center properly?

I’m not sure how I found it, other than shooting at the problem with a “what affects the whole page…that I can change” approach. But, that was it.

It’s time to lose the <center> tag.