Re: Who is right? IE5.5 or Mozilla/Netscape?

Adam van den Hoven <list@adamvandenhoven.com> wrote:

> The first was to use 3 COL elements for the first table and 5 for the
> others. The first COL is always width="*" and the others match up from
> the end. This didn't work very well at all.

AFAIK no popular browser supports MultiLengths ('*', '3*' etc) in columns.
Most authors use percentages instead, though there are other issues with
that.

> The second was to use the same set of COL elements for all 3 tables and
> simply colspan="3" the first column of the first table. This works really
> well in IE5.5 (WinNT). However, if I try it on either NS6.2 or Mozilla
> 0.9.9 the result is very different

Try giving the tables 'table-layout: fixed'. This will ensure the widths
of the columns are honoured exactly (even if that causes some cells to be
too small to fit their contents). It also means the browser can display
the table incrementally. Without this style, browsers' own layout algorithms
may change the widths of columns.

The rule 'table { table-layout: fixed }' made everything line up for me in
your example. BTW, please post a URL rather than attaching the example when
the code is as long as this!

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and@doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/

Received on Tuesday, 19 March 2002 05:05:10 UTC