Tricky Tree Structure with CSS

Hi All,
I'm trying to move an application of mine into the 21st century and ditch
the table intensive layout in favour of CSS. Where I am stumbling can be
seen here:

http://www.csu.edu.au/student/getonw...orum/forum.gif

The layout is currently done using tables but given the number of messages
can be considerable each row is in its own table. While this allows browsers
to start rendering before the download is complete it weighs an aweful lot
in code. To avoid this I was thinking of CSS but now I'm wondering.

The indented subjects looked like a great use for a list but as soon as a do
that I cannot find a way to associate the other fields with the same
horizontal location (row in table-speak) thus making me think I am perhaps
abusing the idea of lists.

Anyways, if anyone has any ideas and/or suggestions on the whole tables
versus CSS for this application I'd appreciate them.

Thanks,
Matt.

M2 wrote:

Hi All,
I'm trying to move an application of mine into the 21st century and ditch
the table intensive layout in favour of CSS. Where I am stumbling can be
seen here:

http://www.csu.edu.au/student/getonw...orum/forum.gif

The layout is currently done using tables but given the number of messages
can be considerable each row is in its own table. While this allows browsers
to start rendering before the download is complete it weighs an aweful lot
in code. To avoid this I was thinking of CSS but now I'm wondering.

The indented subjects looked like a great use for a list but as soon as a do
that I cannot find a way to associate the other fields with the same
horizontal location (row in table-speak) thus making me think I am perhaps
abusing the idea of lists.

A list is something one-dimensional. But your application offers two
dimensions. So a table is ok. You already have table column headers,
well, at least it looks like table headers :-). But this implies, that
you cannot markup the hierarchy. Unfortunately, HTML doesn't offer
markup for a tree like in XUL.
--
Johannes Koch
In te domine speravi; non confundar in aeternum.
(Te Deum, 4th cent.)

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 04:24:59 GMT, "M2" <m2 (AT) nowhere (DOT) com> wrote:

I'm trying to move an application of mine into the 21st century and ditch
the table intensive layout in favour of CSS. Where I am stumbling can be
seen here:

http://www.csu.edu.au/student/getonw...orum/forum.gif

The layout is currently done using tables but given the number of messages
can be considerable each row is in its own table. While this allows browsers
to start rendering before the download is complete it weighs an aweful lot
in code. To avoid this I was thinking of CSS but now I'm wondering.

The list of messages certainly looks like a table to me. Just take the
page header and footer out of the table. You can use a CSS class to put
a bit of padding on the indented messages.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/