During my website’s last redesign (well, not the last redesign, that was to convert it to WordPress), there was one thing I *really* wanted to fix: the “Latest News” section of the home page. Previously, that section was basic text typed into a cell in a table in FrontPage. The problem with doing it that way was that a couple of lengthy news posts would make that section huge, possibly longer that some visitors would read. I wanted to use an inline frame instead, so that way there would be scroll bars on the side. This way I could keep lengthy news posts on the home page for as long as I wanted, yet the fixed size of the frame meant that the rest of the home page – the Rant, the Useless Fact, etc. – would always appear in the same place.
The only problem with using an IFRAME is that Internet Explorer always puts a horizontal scroll bar across the bottom of the frame. This is not only ugly, but useless as well, as the text will wrap regardless of the size of the browser window (for what it’s worth, Firefox renders the page “correctly”). Now the only options available in FrontPage for the frame were to ALWAYS show the scroll bars, NEVER show the scroll bars and to only show them AS NEEDED. I had it set for AS NEEDED, but IE still put that $@^! scroll bar across the bottom, and FrontPage doesn’t offer the option of controlling the individual scroll bar behavior.
So I went online in search of answers. I found many, most of which were CSS or HTML hacks. Neither option was what I needed and most of the HTML tricks simply didn’t work. So I tried to find a solution on my own – and I did! If you use FrontPage and have the same problem, try this: put the contents of your frame’s HTML page into a table and make sure that table has a smaller maximum size than the target table\page. The table on my home page which contains my “Latest News” section is set to 100% of the browser window size. I set the new table be 98% of the size of the browser window – and that !$@(*# horizontal scroll bar no longer appears in IE *or* Firefox.