So one of the biggest issues I have had when practicing designing a website is getting it to fit the window with various screen resolutions. After doing a bit of research it seemed many people said the same thing. Designing your site within a table is the trick to getting it to fit whatever the resolution. Though I've read up on it there were some things I didn't quite understand and I hoped someone here could clarify things for me.
For anyone who understands this method, this is what I understand.
1) You create a table, setting it's width and height to 100% (or less if you want some white space), so that whatever the resolution, it will fit the window.
2) The table I think has 3 rows and 3 columns. Row 1 and 3 (top and bottom) have a set height in px. Also, columns 1 and 3 (left and right) do the same for width. That means the 2nd row and 2nd column are the same cell, which has no set width/height, taking up whatever space the other rows and columns do not.
3) All content, whether they be text or images are put into this one single cell.
If I understood this right then great though I'm sure there are things I got wrong, or things I am missing here. So if anyone who understands this method could clarify this for me it would be greatly appreciated and I would get to practicing this method right away.
I suppose if you are asking if using tables is a viable solution to creating a dynamic width/height website then the answer would be yes.
However my first clarification on all of this would be to use CSS tables rather than the standard <table> tag. You can achieve the same desired visual effect but avoid some of the issues traditional tables can present.
My only other note to you for now would be to use the style properties of margin and padding to set outside whitespace rather than setting a width less than 100%. Using % based whitespace obviously makes the whitespace change with the size of the browser window and thus changes the desired result depending on the user's resolution or window size.
"Given billions of tries, could a spilled bottle of ink ever fall into the words of Shakespeare?"
many people said the same thing. Designing your site within a table is the trick
To be honest, no Web design experts I know, or have contact with in the various Web development Forums I participate in would ever recommend using tables as the basis for a flexible resolution Web site.
So coming from that background, I'd suggest that you not waste your time learning a method of Web design as limited as designing using tables but rather put your efforts into learning CSS layout and positioning. It is FAR more flexible, powerful, and forward looking than working with tables.
Best wishes,
Eye for Video www.cidigitalmedia.com
The TABLE tag should only be used for tabular data, not website layout. Use DIV elements; they are faster to render, and have long become the standard of website layout structure.
I appreciate the input thank you. So as far as getting web pages to fit in various screen resolutions, what is it you DO recommend? Should just using a proper mix of fixed and fluid values (depending on what it is you're trying to do) do the trick? I'm sure this is a really basic question, I just don't have too much experience with this yet.
Fluid vs. fixed largely depends on your use of images for the design as they will cause the most grief when dealing with a fluid design. I have a site I'm working on that's on my PC where the client side of the site is fixed as where the admin part of it is fluid.
Right. To an advanced HTML(and CSS) user divs are better. But I give advices to newbies. Firstly let them should learn basics.
Better they should learn how to do it correctly than learn it wrong, then unlearn and then learn it right.
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