So I've worked out the menu thing using part of the PHP solution Ricin posted at the top of the thread.

Now I need some standards help. I've not had too much of a problem with the XHTML transition, except for one thing that they have made incredibly difficult: table height.

Okay, so the HTML table height tag has deprecated. But they've made it so that it is far more difficult to do using CSS. Why? This is incredibly frustrating.

So I have a table 750 pixels wide which I want to fill the page. This table only has two rows, the top one with a menu 60 pixels high, and the bottom one I want to expand to the size of the current area. In order to get the table to expand at all, I had to have this in the style sheet:

html, body
{
text-align: center;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
height: 100%
}

I'm doing this entirely in styles now, because I've been told to So I have a class for the table with 'height: 100%', and class for the cells in the first row (three of them) all with 'heigh: 60px'. In old, lenient, HTML (in IE, at least), this would automatically expand the bottom row to fill out the 100% specified for the table. This does, in fact, make a table that fits 100% of the screen, but the top row has been pulled taller, and the two rows don't even match in size! Even when I take out the height for the top row, when I should get a result of two rows each taking up half of the screen, it's the same odd size as before.

So, I put the 60px height back in for the top row, and try adding a 100% to one of the cells on the bottom (still using classes). This time everything initially looks like it should, with the menu the correct height and the bottom row filling the rest of the screen, but then I notice that I have a vertical scrollbar. Turns out that the 100% for the bottom row meant 100% of the entire page and not just what was left after the 60px is taken out.

So I ask two things: first, how do I do what I'm trying to do using CSS? and second, why in God's name is this supposed to be better? Using simple HTML I could do this with absolutely no problem whatsoever. Yes, browsers displayed things differently, but as far as I could see that was the fault of the browsers and not the standard. It's a standard that wasn't lived up to. Why is this supposed to be different, and why the hell did they make it so difficult??