[WEB4LIB] Re: help with FrontPage

[Thomas Dowling]

>
>>2.  the alignment of the cells within the table is off when the page is
>displayed in two of our small monitors and the color of the graphic
>supporting the image map is also wrong.  Is there anything I can do to the
>page so that it will display properly in all  monitors.
>
>I looked at your table cells and noticed that you are using percent widths.
>This may be playing havoc with the layout on smaller monitors, particularly
>if the percent width of the cell containing the image doesn't allow enough
>room for the graphic, which would alter the cell next to it. Using percents
>for cell widths is disallowed in HTML 3.2 and 4.0, as I recall.

And for a pretty sound reason (although it's a construct I will continue to
use on occasion until COL and COLGRP are widely supported).   All versions
of Netscape that do anything with <TD WIDTH="xx%"> calculate the percentage
as a fraction of the table's width, as do IE 4.x and 5.0b.  IE 3.x, however,
calculates <TD WIDTH="xx%"> as a fraction of the *screen's* width.  So this
table might be very strangely rendered on IE 3.0:

<TABLE WIDTH="75%">
<TR>
  <TD WIDTH="67%">A wide cell.</TD>
  <TD>This cell might be narrower than you think.</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>


>> I know the color is probably controlled by the settings in the windows
>display within the control panel, but automation has locked us out of that
>area of those computers.  I'm assuming that I have no control over how the
>color will display in Joe Public's monitor if he has it set to a limited
>number of colors.
>
>Nope. But, what you can do is try to use 'browser safe' color palettes when
>you design graphics. It reduces the number of colors you have to work with,
>but at least your colors won't look too funky on PCs using 256 colors.
>

True.  The mnemonic for the 216 safe color palette is that the RGB values
are all hex multiples of 33 (00, 33, 66, 99, CC, FF).  So a "safe" medium
blue is #000099 -- not #000080, which throws some people off.

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu