> From: Peter Salzman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I'm always amazed that I aced through a year of quantum field theory but CSS > continually baffles me to no end. > > If I have some html tables, and set the height and width CSS property for > each td element, is it guaranteed that each cell in each table will be the > exact same height and width under all circumstances? > > If not, is there some way of saying "Look here, browser. As Zeus is my > witness, you will make this cell 3em by 2em no matter what!"
I'm pretty sure the answer is: no. I don't think there's a way to make an absolute guarantee that your size will not change. There's something you should know about CSS, too: it is a very powerful and flexible stylesheet language, but it's not quite complete, and support for it in any browser I can think of has never been, either (this includes Firefox and Opera, though AFAIK Opera is the better of the two in that regard). This and other W3C specifications insist that CSS should always be used for formatting instead of things like tables, and yet they have more or less failed to provide some of the /precise/ levels of control available via old-fashioned, reliable-but-deprecated HTML table formatting (or, in some cases, mainstream support for CSS has failed to provide the appropriate level of precise control demanded by the spec). I am ignoring the "cheat" of using CSS to trick the browser into thinking that a given element should be rendered as a table or table cell: that amounts to pretty much the same thing, in the end. For this reason, CSS is one of those things where it is often impossible to be both pragmatic /and/ completely correct (from a standards perspective). This actually is true of HTML itself in certain cases as well. I myself am very much a standards stickler, and tried for years to write only ever standard-conforming code (as I still pretty much continue to do with C and C++). This is not possible in many applications. So: use CSS wherever possible. It is by far the best choice, where it is reliably supported. Where you can't get CSS to do what you need it to on all of your target browsers, don't be afraid to use HTML tables or other tried-and-true tricks in defiance of W3C recommendations. Web markup and formatting technologies is one of the worst areas for trying to match up specifications with real-world implementations support :( -- Still lamenting MSIE's abysmal support for the <object/> tag... Micah J. Cowan Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer... http://micah.cowan.name/ _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
