>I assume you've noticed the behavior that occurs (in most of the web
>browsers I've used) where, if there is an "element" in the page wider
>than the window width, the window expands horizontally to accomodate
>this element. (It happens for wide graphics, tables, and "preformatted
>text".) You must scroll horizontally to see the entire graphic, table,
>or "preformatted text". Unfortunately, all other text then wraps at the
>same width, which means you must scroll horizontally to read any text.
>It is this second behavior that I find annoying -- do you know of any
>HTML tags that can be used to control the width at which text wraps, or
>any other workaround short of building a program to wrap the text at a
>reasonable width and then enclose it in <pre> tags or something like
>that?
>
>Is this an issue of HTML or an issue of how browsers have implemented
>HTML. Even if it is an issue with how browsers' implement HTML, it
>would be nice if the "HTML people" added something to deal with this
>issue.
Actually, this is not an HTML issue--it is an issue of some, not all HTML
developers developing fixed width pages. I mean, just because something
looks good at 1024 x 768, doesn't mean that people using 640 x 480 (or for
that matter 800 x 600) will be able to see it without having to scroll
horizontally. There are several ways to handle this -- do not set a
specific width for a table column, or use stylesheets for positioning and
instead of stuff like <font> </font> and so forth (the preferred way for
html 4.01 and xhtml 1.x).
A standard 640 x 480 screen can see at most about 600-620 pixels before you
end up scrolling horizontally. Anyways, a good designer / developer will
set up a site such that it will resize accordingly based on how large /
small the screen is.
An 2-column example (in strict xhtml 1.0 / css 2.0, that works for at the
very least Netscape 4.77, IE 5.5, Netscape 6.x, and Mozilla) where the left
column is "fixed" width, and the right column is "variable" can be seen here:
http://webspinners.uwf.org/~mviron/prototypes/mvo/index-test.php (I
haven't seen this in all browsers on all OSes, so I'm not sure how well it
looks on earlier versions of Netscape, IE, and so forth--if you do try a
browser I don't list here, send me a screenshot off list with what it looks
like)
Michael
--
Michael Viron
Registered Linux User #81978
Senior Systems & Administration Consultant, Web Spinners, Univ. of West
Florida
Project Coordinator / Primary Developer, General Education Online
