Turning the Tables
by Heather Champ
Tables have been embraced by web designers and developers as a very useful tool for arranging information and imagery. There currently is no other easy way to h ave so much control over layout. The wide acceptance of this tool may turn and b ite the individuals who have so championed the results.
After continually snubbing it's nose at the World Wi de Web Consortiums' HTML standards Netscape has decided to comply. The table tag which previously could be wangled into accepting numbers that seem to defea t the laws of mathematics now will remain true. If the sum of all the elements w ithin a table cell exceeds the width specified in it's tag, the elements will mi salign and not display in the way intended. Previous versions of the browser hav e blithely ignored the differences, but the release of Communicator is about to change all that.
While Communicator seems to give on one hand with the promise of layers it is de finitely taking away with the other. Now is the time to go back through previous projects to determine how much cleaning up has to be done. Given that it can ta ke some time for the majority of surfers to catch up to the latest release there is a small window of opportunity to fix errors which at the time of their creat ion didn't seem to have the potential for disaster that now looms.
A Few Table Tips
Avoid long tables
Don't use one large table. The nasty truth about tables is that as g ood as they are for layout, the information will not display in the browser wind ow until the end table tag is found. When Slate launched last summer, the entire page was contained within one table and it t ook an inordinate amount of time to render. Break the information into a number of smaller tables so there is more of a flow of information.View through multiple browsers
It's crucial to view your finished work through both Netscape and In ternet Explorer. In a perfect world there would be fewer versions, betas, etc. t o contend with. I recently viewed a site through IE [version number] only to dis cover a case of rampant collapsing table. The browser was ignoring all the line break
tags I had included to arrange information.Use an HTML Checker
If your table is displaying properly chances are your code is error free but, it's worth the small inconvenience to check your HTML as a final step before uploading. I still like to run my code through an HTML checker and someti mes have to wince with the little boo-boos which emerge. BBEdit has a wonderful built in utility which you can run as ea sily as adding a tag. If you rather check your documents online you can try the services of Doctor HTML -- you have t he opportunity to test drive the service for free (freebie of the week!). Along with the checking the HTML, Doctor HTML tests the links, assesses the file size, and pro bable download time.
