[thelist] table widths (was: css - can you put comments in there?)

deke web at master.gen.in.us
Tue May 15 09:30:06 CDT 2001


On 14 May 2001, at 21:17, Hassan Schroeder posted a message which said:
> > Percentages in TABLE and TD tags are *spozed* to be based on the
> > width of the window. The ones that *don't* do so are the broken ones.
> > It says so in the HTML specification.
 
> Uh, not really :-)
> From:  http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#adef-width-TABLE
 > width = length [CN] 
>  This attribute specifies the desired width of the entire table and 
>  is intended for visual user agents. When the value is a percentage 
>  value, the value is relative to the user agent's available horizontal 
>  space. In the absence of any width specification, table width is 
>  determined by the user agent. 
 
> "available horizontal space" *could* - some would say should :-) - 
> be reasonably the width of the parent (immediate enclosing) block 
> element - <body>, <div>, <td>, whatever ... 

I would agree that "available horizontal space" SHOULD be the width
of the immediately enclosing block element. 

However, that's not what the HTML specification says.  The horizontal 
space available to the table is the distance between the margins.

There's an interesting - difficult to follow on first reading, but still
interesting - discussion on how to lay out tables in the "recommended
layout algorithms" section of the specification. 

deke


------------------------
 "The church is near but the road is icy; 
  the bar is far away but I will walk carefully." 
                            -- Russian Proverb




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