The problem with this layout are three things:
First: There is no doctype declaration. IE won't bother that much, as it is very tolerant to W3C standard mistakes, but the other browsers demand it.
And furthermore you can be shure, that the site is displayed in all MODERN browsern in the same way, when the site validates. And in this site there are some mistakes concerning standards, even if you validate it as html 4.01 Transitional:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwindowcapping.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional
Ok, they are not all really big mistakes, but especially the two things with the end tags won't be tolerated by browsers others than IE.
I hope you don't mind, John, that I put your site through W3C validation. But I know, that there are still a lot of people who do not believe in tableless CSS-Design. And if you do not show them the reasons, why a site might not work in all browsers, they feel that they are right by saying that this way of doing websites is not good yet.
Btw. your CSS validates perfectly.
Second: If you ask a webdesigner, he would say, that working with Frontpage is one of the biggest mistakes you can do. To me, I think this is a really hard opinion, but I can understand it. You can make frontpage to put out a rather good code, but the efforts will be so big, that you can write the site by hand or with a real html-Editor.
Third: The reason, why you, Timothy, see things like that, is, that your university is using an old browser. I imagine it is Netscape 4.7+. This is not only old, but antique. I know that many administrators especially at universities hang on NS 4.7+ like they where stuck on it.
When the German law about websites of official institutions was made, universities cried loud, that they need more time than there was in the law. So another study was made, whether this crying of universities was right. And the conclusion was, that there is no need for NS 4.7+ anymore. It was told that under the aspect of security and some other reasons, IE is not appropriate. But you can have a later version of NS or better Mozilla or
Firebird or even Opera. All these browsers offer all things that were demanded by the universities.
One comparison:
If you drive a real oldtimer car, you do not expect that you get everything for it at every garage. You do not expect to have the same comfort you have in nowadays cars. But in Webdesign unfortunately all people expect this.
So I think the step originally done by alistapart was absolutely correct. They say: Do not exclude anyone from the content of a website, but do not bother for old brothers when it comes to design.
So old browsers see the sites similar as if you look at the site with a plain text browser. Your screenshot is the result.
There is only one thing that should be changed in the CSS-Layout: The div with the menu must be defined first in the (X)Html-file, so that the menu ist displayed on top of the side in older browsers, so that navigation is more comfortable.
My personal opinion is: I'm happy that people from Alistapart did this step and that you can say it grows as movement. Because this was one initial thing, that Webdesigners changed their mind and were no longer slaves of old browsers by having all the nice things in mind, they could do if they only would not have to support the oldtimer browsers. Perhaps some of you made experiences temselves when they did websites. Nearly for every browser you needed special hacks. This changed. If you write a standard conform code, you only need to develope for one browser. OK, there are some minor hacks in Box-model for IE, but this is nothing compared to the old times.
Webdesign did not go forward for a rather long time compared to the developments made at W3C.org. This changed by the very nice @import code shown by alistapart. That reveals modern CSS from old browsers that cannot interpret it but on the other hand opens the door, that the content of the site is displayed nevertheless.
Greetings from Bavaria
Susanne
