Re: HTML 4.0, TABLE/TD width units incongruity

|>The HTML 4.0 spec (loose.dtd) indicates:
|>
|>   <TABLE WIDTH="123"> --valid
|>   <TD    WIDTH="123"> --valid
|>   <TABLE WIDTH="50%"> --valid
|>   <TD    WIDTH="50%"> --invalid (!)
|>
|>Why???  Looks like a mistake to me. Navigator and IE have supported
|>percentages as TD widths for a very long time, and it is absolutely
|>*vital* for scalability. Why does 4.0 specify only pixels for TD width?
|
|
|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.
|
|2) In HTML 4.0 strict, this attribute does not appear at all. I'd suggest
|that the use of widths in tables is only useful when they're being used for
|layout purposes.

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

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 19:53:33 UTC