[WEB4LIB] Can I have everything I want?

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Valerie Lawrence" <lawrencv at OHSU.EDU>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2000 8:36 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Can I have everything I want?


> Well, maybe that question's a little too broad... here's what I want to
> do.
>
> I have a page that I want to use a background graphic with blue on the
> left, a thin black line, and white to the right.  So far, so good.  The
> background graphic looks the way I want it to.  The page copy is all in
a
> table.  I want the table to be relative-sized (percentage rather than
> pixels) so it will display "decently" (I know, relative term! I mean
> without too much white space at the right) on any monitor resolution.  I
> know it can't be perfect on all, but I want it to be acceptable on any
and
> I don't want low-res users to have to scroll to the right. My main
problem
> is that I want to force the navigation bar to display within the blue
> area, and the main copy to display within the white area, for all
> resolutions, for all browsers, for all time.  ;^)  Not that I'm a
control
> freak, or anything.


As others have pointed out, any attempt to align text with a background
image is doomed to failure for some percentage of your users.

Conceptually, what you want is very simple to do with CSS: it's just two
blocks of text, one with a blue background and a black border on the
right, the other with a white background.  The problem, of course, is
Netsc^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser support.  As a transitional design, I recommend you
experiment with a table design that puts the blue background in the
left-hand table cell(s) rather than on the page background, preferably
with style properties, or with bgcolor attributes.

As for screen resolution, I'm afraid the big challenge is not your table
tags, but your 500px-wide logo, especially combined with a 116px-wide
image in another table column.  There's 616 pixels of width right there,
even with no widths specified on table cells (remember that with window
elements and scrollbars, even a maximized window at 640x480 will probably
only have about 620px viewable width).  Get the logo out of your table,
and many of your width problems go away.  There's no requirement that all
table cells have widths assigned to them.  You could certainly do
something like:

  <table class="maintable" width="95%">
    <col width="140">
    <col width="*">
    <tr>
      <td class="leftbar" width="140">...</td>
      <td class="mainbody">...</td>
    </tr>
  </table>


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