I don't mind if you (or anybody else) wants to read the pages in a narrow view - I don't - and I prefer pages designed that allow me to do either.

The Herald page mentioned above uses some nice JS which is used to open a new window - it just basically overloads the default built-in method with a new JS method which is mostly indistinguishable from the default. I scratch my head and say why? It just wastes space. The worst instance of this tyoe of thing I have seen is the JS code which allows you to click on it to put the bookmark of the page in the browser into a link on your PC. I don't know of any browser that doesn't have that facility built in - once again I scratch my head and say why? These sorts of tricks are all very nice at demonstrating the wonderful properties and powers of the scripting language - but why do them?

The herald floating trick is just a centered table in an overall table - looks very nice and is a good example of "rigid design" - or just copying the format of the pre-printed page on a screen. Because of their style of content, the left and right columns work well as fixed width, but the two center ones could easily autoflow because of their content style, as could the whole page - only minor changes to the design are needed. If this part autoflowed, I wouldn't need to step down three times to see the contents of the whole page.


SRS: "The various web folks who work with me on this agree that in general confining the content within tables keeps it looking better. I'm not actually sure what all you said you're doing--clearly there are different terms to describe the task at hand. "

I haven't seen your work, and I will take for granted that it looks good for your purposes. Why do people always assume they are being personally attacked when someone passes a differing or dissenting opinion?

I confine most of my stuff in tables for formatting purposes: if you don't use frames - there is no other real way to do it - unless you use Word :-P

But my stuff is still designed to autoflow within almost every one of the row/coloumn matrix cells. Occassionally I need to hold something rigid, especially in width, everything else flows. The pages are easier to design if you don't fight the design concepts of the tools you work with.

I once needed to design a layout of several graphic images to mock up people standing in front of a theatre curtin - all done in an autoflowing table within a table - it conforms to the screen size automatically - as does the brick fireplace complete with animated fire I built for another page using graphics and tables. I can dig up the links to these if asked.

These graphics tricks of course fall flat for the visually impaired, but my page design has been favourably mentioned by those with visual impairments who use text speech readers.

I hack my HTML by hand with EditPlus - I use the browser to see what happens if I do anything tricky - but now I can mostly visualise it mentally. I first played with phototypsetters back in 1978/9 for printing the UoQ Computing Club Magazine. They are designed to autoflow text - but there was no physical preview facility - you put the codes in your text file, fed it in, and looked at the resultant printed page, which you paid real money to get printed. One quickly learned to think what the effects would be in advance. Wordperfect came along, and - hey! used most of the same concepts - even similar codes - and then HTML arrived and I said - I've seen most of this before...

The HTML use of tables was a technical hack to assist layout - people's use of the technology outstripped the original simple design concept. Another trick was using single pixel graphics, expanded to whatever size block you wanted to pad out text in tables. Frames seem to have fallen into disfavour nowadays - many older browsers couldn't handle them in the early days of frames being available, so the table format became the done thing.

I gave up using anything other than hand hacking years ago when I loaded my pages into some of these early editing tools and watched in horror as the code expanded to 3-4 times its original size, and often looked worse. If working in an organisation which uses a certain editing tool as policy - I am quite happy to use that tool, even if I may not always like the look of the results.

Robin