Creating a webpage, need some advice

[Svenne]

Hello fellow Cemetechians!
For some time now I've been trying to create a website for my parents, who run a china shop. However, no matter how hard I try, I can't get it to work properly.
First off, I can't even get it to display properly. If you look at the files I've posted at the bottom of this post you'll see that there's no doctype declaration. The reason is that it makes the page display incorrectly. This is how it looks like in Firefox without the doctype declaration:

It's pretty much how it's supposed to look, but for some reason Firefox adds padding for the copyright disclaimer, even though I've the default padding to 0px.
...and this is how it looks like with the doctype declaration:

The purple background disappears completely, and the content div ends up being 0 pixels high.

I also have problems with content overflow; instead of the page getting taller, the content petrudes out the bottom of the page, leaving an ugly gap at the bottom. I've set the content div to automatically use scrollbars when it happens, but this leads to the copyright notice always being visible on the screen.

Finally, there's the catalogue (on the page named 'butik.html'). I've created a script which reads the contents of an .xml and outputs it as a table. The problem is, the table doesn't display at all. When looking in Firefox' web console I can see it loading the document properly, but I don't get any output. I have absolutely no idea why this happens.

Here's the files incase anyone's intrested in taking a look: http://www.mediafire.com/?73a5036tpet3p8a

If anyone could help, it'd be very appreciated.

[Sorunome]

In that zip isn't the css-stylesheet, so I don't know how you'r making it... :/
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[comicIDIOT]

Feel free to post the CSS to paste bin and link it for those of us who have already downloaded the files already, we can make the CSS file ourselves by copy-pasting.
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-Alex

[Svenne]

Oops, forgot to include it. I've updated the archive in the OP.

[KermMartian]

Chances are that your HTML and/or CSS is broken and malformed, which is why it suddenly falls apart when you specify a doctype and your browser(s) turn down their ability to correct for errors in CSS and HTML. If I get some time after working on my book today I will try to look through what you have so far and see if I can spot anything. Also, be sure to use the W3C validators to track down typos and errors in your HTML and CSS:

http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
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[Rhombus P.]

I think your problems lie in all the position: absolute and position: relative. When i started playing around with the code i got the background to at least show up by changing the div.content from position :absolute to position : relative but i would recommend re-writing it to use more container divs and less positions