Mmm. Thanks Bo, I think.
I vowed to stay away from this formatting nightmare, but couldn't resist
a little fiddle time late last night.
Aye, 'tis 'ard t' fight the urge.
This is becoming more and more confusing as I go -- how does that
go now: Tom's Insight Rule #435? The more I learn, the less I know???
Yes... this about sums up the quest for knowledge.
Point 1: When I created my layout, I built it using a TWO tables per
day format (as opposed to Bob's ONE table per day format). As we all know,
I didn't think about the view from either another browser or at a different
resolution at this time. Further, I couldn't find any command to proportion
the tables across the page (eg. 10/90%). Do-da, do-da. You've followed the
story. Well last night I played around with selecting the right hand row
of tables, and instead of choosing TABLE PROPERTIES, I chose CELL PROPERTIES,
removed any specification to cell height, and selected 90% cell width. I
then selected the left column of tables, did the same, but set it to 10%
width. I was waiting to see if anyone noticed. It appears I'm on to something
here. BUT...
Works, unless of course other settings mess it up for
you.
Point 2: I also did ALL my journal pages and a few others as well.
My current insights page (1/11/99) held the format and works as advertised.
A couple of the others I checked this morning did not and act as before.
WTF?????
One possibility, the overall table may still have a fixed px size,
in which case the % distribution will be calculated on this. Another is that
there is something in a table cell that forces a fixed width.
Point 3: I installed Netscape 4.05 this morning on my Win98 partition.
This is how/where I picked up on my journal pages format being correct on
1/11/99 but not so on 1/4/99. I also noted a vast and confusing array of
font formatting on my left side navigation tables. I selected all-caps-arial-8pt
(size 1 in HTML-speak) and it looks tickey-boo in IE. Again, WTF. How is
it that Netscape interprets something as default as Arial in different
sizes/shapes/forms? Is this because I'm not using the 'default' typeface
(TNR)? I would think, though, that even Netscape would support Arial -- that's
why I chose it. Blast.
Ah yes, now you can really begin to experience the "relativity
principle" of the Web: "What you get is what you
got."
Netscape has its own way of interpreting, or not, any number of
tags. One of the reasons I finally gave up on Netscape, although it used
to be my browser of preference. In any case, and fortunately, the "Mozilla
standard" ends with v4.5 and the AOL purchase, and can be considered obsolescent.
Netscape 5 seems likely to be a complete rewrite along the lines of Opera
and with the intention of being "squeaky-clean"
W3C-HTML-compliant.
Now I'm not sure how this is 'supposed' to work (is there a 'supposed
to' in the world of web publishing -- I'm beginning to think not), but I
assume that setting table percents should equalize table viewing to the settings
supplied (in my case, 10% left/90% right). Does the fact that you're not
seeing any change in the left table mean something is still not equally
represented across browsers?
Well, one "problem" with %-width settings is that they depend somewhat
on cell contents and how any given browser handles this. I understand for
example that a totally empty cell may cause a table to not render well regarless
of settings, which is why hard spaces (" ") are often inserted. In
some browsers, column width will not resize smaller than the longest word
in any cell. In others, even words get wrapped if forced by the current width.
PRE-tagged text and images as content override any width setting.
And is my 10% right column size too small?
Probably ok given the font size you "suggest"...
Bob suggested the 13/87 split. I was experimenting and looking for
change I could see, so chose round numbers. I need this feedback though before
I go start making wholesale changes.
Precisely why I prefer CSS when possible, since this centralizes
all relevant cosmetic changes to a single layout file.
--
hb
(Amazon links)