WEB4LIB digest 950

[Thomas Dowling]

-----Original Message-----
From: JQ Johnson <jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Monday, February 02, 1998 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: WEB4LIB digest 950


>Bob Long writes:
>
>>><img src="your.gif" width=100%>
> ...
>> Is this new?
>
>Not very new; it's been in widespread use since Netscape 2.0 (pixel widths
>have been around since Netscape 1.1 or earlier.  Although percentage widths
>are not part of HTML 3.2, they are part of HTML 4.0 (so Thomas Dowling
>didn't use them until recently, right? :-)).

Still not, actually.  The fact that it's in the spec doesn't *require* me to
use it... :-)

>...See
><http://www.htmlcompendium.org/img.htm> for a general discussion of IMG
>tags.  Note that some versions of browsers behave very nonintuitively if
>only HEIGHT or WIDTH (not both) is specified, or when a percentage width is
>specified for an IMG in a table cell where the width of that column depends
>on the width of the cell.


I'm not sure what counts as intuitive when you only specify one dimension in
an image.  Remember, your browser has no way of knowing that what you really
want is a fancy <HR>, so I think it's understandable if it maintains the
image's aspect ratio when scaling the width to 100%.  Try that on a
1600x1200 screen with the browser maximized.  The results may not be what
you expect...

In fairness, you could try something like <img src="foo.gif" width="100%"
height="5">.

In any case, your users may not actually think this is the coolest thing
since sliced bread.  An earlier response suggested that <HR> is overused in
general and could easily be replaced by with a simple, centered inline image
or white space (validly created with stylesheets, of course!)

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