Re: HTML 4.0, TABLE/TD width units incongruity

At 4:54p -0800 01/13/99, Inanis Brooke wrote:
>|1) Netscape and Microsoft have supported *different interpretations* of
>|percentage widths in <TD> for some time. Navigator seems to interpret the
>|percentage value as a percentage of the entire viewable screen, while MSIE
>|interprets it as a percentage of the width of the table. I suspect that
>|this is the reason that no percentages are included in the HTML 4.0
>|transitional.

>I've had a similar problem... what you cannot forget is that with MSIE's
>implementation of <TD> width by percentage, you are able to create a page
>layout that will scale itself to fill an entire browser window and have the
>cell widths retain their proportion.

Which is exactly how it should be.

>I would have taken advantage of this
>if it weren't for the fact that NS didn't implement tables this way...

Basically MS fixed Netscape's bug. <g> I hope the Mozilla.org/gecko/NGT
folks fix it likewise. Logically, the percentage should be of the object
of which the sized item is an element. That is, a table is a percentage
of a page because it is an element of the page; since a cell is an element
of a table, its width as a percentage should be of the table. Otherwise,
you might get <table width="50%"> and <td width="100%"> which would make
no sense using a cell-as-percentage-of-page approach.


-Walter
 Scalability takes precedence over DTDs. User-friendliness is paramount.

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 21:23:16 UTC