- From: Mikko Rantalainen <mira@st.jyu.fi>
- Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 19:52:23 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
- CC: David Balch <david.balch@continuing-education.oxford.ac.uk>
David Balch wrote: > Hi, > > I've been looking around the CSS resources (Values and Units module in > particular), and see that there is no proprotional length like multilength > in HTML [1] available. There's also reference to MultiLength in <URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstraction.html#dt_MultiLength>. I hope that we can get equivalent feature to the CSS side as something like this is especially nice to have when one is trying to display content that has been generated on the fly. For example, I could display a table with company products in a table with binary properties listed for each product. If I want to make all those binary property cells to have similar widths I currently have to define explicit width for every one of those. However, defining explicit width is hard because user's viewport size isn't known and I could provide an option to select how many property columns the user wants to see. I really cannot use prewritten CSS for such table because the number of property columns can change (the percentage unit doesn't fit). If I could use MultiLenght-like unit, I could specify the width of first column (containing product name) in em's and let the user agent to handle the rest proportionally and still get a nice layout. I think this new unit should be limited for table cells and columns only. Or perhaps it should be allowed for defining the height of table row, too. -- Mikko
Received on Thursday, 6 February 2003 12:52:30 UTC