I am a self taught web-designer, and have not had many lessons in html best practices.

I am currently making a website that uses tables for the page layout, and the elements therein. All of the pages display perfectly using Firefox and Konqueror, but when I open them in IE6, they just arent showing up right.

I found that one of the problems was a whitespace problem, that was inserting small spaces in between my graphics, but I have two pages where portions of the page are PHP generated. The HTML in these pages is identical to all other pages, and I am 90% positive that the PHP output is not sticking in extra tags that are messing up the existing HTML.

I used the table to create borders around the page, and I am finding that certain edges just arent showing up at all, yet their pure HTML counterparts are.

Also, I have read in a couple of articles here at DaniWeb that tables are a bad thing to use for layouts. Could someone explain why that is, and does my problem have anything to do with that reason.

Thanks

welcome to web design.

You should prolly use conditional comments to include an IE only stylesheet so you can make changes for only IE.

It would be wise to stop using tables for non-tabular data. Ues div's instead. Link to tableless layouts

Download the free starter of HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition here. That should get you started and give you a good understanding. (Same position than you mate...)