HTML Screen Wrap can be frustrating, but was one of the intentional design criteria of HTML.

What can make it difficult to understand is that not all screen sizes of the viewers of your page are the same. So the original intent was to allow the text content to flow to fill the viewscreen. Later attempts to turn HTML into a psuedo Word Processing and Screen Layout language confused things, as did the addition of graphics. This can be too lengthy to dicsuss here.

If you specify the width of your page in pixels (a straight number), then somebody is likely to have probelms displaying the page in the restricted way you designed it. If you do things in the percentage way (25%) for width of particular columns, you do have to try things out on differnt screen sizes to see what happens, until you get used to visualising things.

Many of those nice page generation programs seem to make teh job easier to do, but can create tangled (often incorrect enough to confuse web browers) code, but I've discussed this elsewhere.

Of course you can geberate HTML code that is syntacticly correct and that will pass validation, but that still doesn't mean that it will display things the way that you thought it would. I can rememebr hours of frustration myself when I was learning... :-) A lot of the "guide books" weren't all that helpful either...

Mary seems to be relatively inexperienced with HTML, so what I can suggest is that she looks at what Alice generates, and try to take the time to understand the basics of what the difference in the coding is.

Unfortunately, becoming proficient in anly creative skill takes time - learning to sing or play any musical instrument do too - we don;t expect someone learning their first instrument after a couple of weeks to be as proficient as someone who has played for forty years... :-)

Hang in there and don't get too frustrated.

Robin