Columns

There is still no COLUMN (I'm not talking of a table column, but
newspaper column) element in the W3C recommendations, so authors use the
TABLE element to get the effect of columns. The W3C recommends that
tables should not be used for layout purposes -- but do not practice
what they preach as the W3C main page consists of tables. But if there
is no COLUMN element, what can one do to get the effect? Until such time
as there is a COLUMN element authors will continue to use the TABLE
element.

Style sheets and 'pseudo' columns.
One could force columns in the following way, but none of the browsers
support this fully yet.
Theoretically the following markup should result in a column:

.columnleft {
 width: 40%;
 height: 300px
}
.columnright {
 margin-top: -300px;
 margin-left: 50%;
 width: 40%;
 vertical-align: text-top
}

This can then be appleid to block elements such as DIV or P.

However, Netscape totally ignores this.
IE 4 ignores DIV and when P is used, you can see the right column box is
in the proper position (if you declare a border so that you can see it),
but it seems that 'width' is not recognized by IE, as the content of the
right column displays below the left column and not in the top of the
right 'column' box.

So, when can we expect an HTML COLUMN element?
Jacques

Received on Friday, 25 September 1998 13:02:57 UTC