[thelist] Tables and things

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Mon Jul 15 13:27:02 CDT 2002


Joel,

> So, my question: is there a way to tell it to expand the article column to
its
> full potential (or shrink the links column to its minimum for the content
it
> contains) without specifying a certain px width?

Yes.

This is not a terribly "proper" way to do things, but:
(1) Use a width="1%" attribute on both your right-hand nav bar td and your
left-hand graphic td.
(2) Use a width="98%" attribute on your main content td.

This will cause the browser to shrink the left- and right- hand cells as
much as possible. (Technically, given an arbitrarily high resolution at
which 1% of the available area was still more than you wanted the cells to
take up, this could fail.)

Jonathan.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Konkle-Parker [mailto:jjk3 at msstate.edu]
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 10:59 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Tables and things


I've got an XSLT stylesheet that transforms XML pages into XHTML pages (but
that's not really important).

As an example, look at:
http://www.ballsome.com/games/software/articles/20020304-1.xml

The entire page is embedded in a big table, as such:

----------------------------
|  |<thead> - menus, etc   |
----------------------------
|B |                |links||
|a |  <tbody>       |     ||
|l |                |form ||
|l |  4 columns     |     ||
|s |                |copy-||
|o |  article       |right||
|m |  content       |     ||
|e |                |etc  ||
----------------------------
|  | <tfoot> - 2 columns   |
----------------------------

The entire width of the table is a set px number, but none of the columns
have
set widths or heights. In most of the pages, the article content is wide
enough
to wrap around, pushing the links column as narrow as possible with the
content
it contains. That's the desirable condition.

Now, look at this page:
http://www.ballsome.com/games/games.xml

This has the same layout, except the article column isn't wide enough to
fill
itself, and it collapses in kind of an ugly fashion.

So, my question: is there a way to tell it to expand the article column to
its
full potential (or shrink the links column to its minimum for the content it
contains) without specifying a certain px width?

-joel



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