Re: Uneven columns

andre (AT) syspoint (DOT) com.br (Doctor X) wrote in message news:<bfcf2f52.0307291302.4be0945e (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>...

I've trying to build a uneven column for a timeline,

It would be illogical to describe the content as a single table, since
it is part of the essence of a table that it consists of a collection
of isomorphic structures, called "rows" (which divide into elements
called "cells" so that each row has basically the same division
into cells - that's what I mean by "isomorphic").

And in practice it would be rather awkward to try to format it
the way you like. The way tables are defined in HTML works against that,
since browsers are _expected_ to adjust the appearance of cells (in
visual presentation) so that cells of a row have the same height.

I'm using ROWSPAN to do it and it's working fine.

As usual, it would have been essential to post the URL. Now I can
just guess that you conceptually divided the timeline into years
or other basic units, then defined each cell's ROWSPAN as occupying
the suitable number of such units. That would make the structure
a genuine table, in a sense, but it would be rather awkward to implement.
And I'm pretty sure that in non-visual presentation, the table would
be a mess. How would you read aloud such a table?

But I would like
that the cells get the exact height I want.

On the WWW, you can be sure of never being able to be sure that you
get anything in the exact dimensions you want.

I found out that <TD HEIGHT="xxx"> is part of HTML 4 (even though is
deprecated). But the problem is: the HEIGHT part of TD is just a
recomendation, so most browsers act strangely with it.

Quite right. Maybe browsers _should_ format the document the way
you want, if your markup is what I'm guessing. But the rendering
of tables gets complicated when ROWSPAN or COLSPAN are used,
and I'm not surprised at browsers' failures.

The HEIGHT part of TD is
deprecated in favour of what?

In favor of style sheets, and specifically the height property there.
Note that in a style sheet, you can use more meaningful units than
pixels. In your case, it's probably best to make the heights relative
to the font size. There's an example on my page
which is in Finnish, but the style sheet shows one possibility of
setting cell heights the way I mean.

But in addition to this, in your case I would probably use nested
tables - because there is an inherent nesting of tabular structure.
I would use an outer table with one row and three cells, corresponding
to different views on time and each containing a table with one column
only, corresponding to a division of time into periods. That way,
the (inner) cells would probably get their individual heights, since
they would not be treated as part of a row containing other cells.
You would just need to make the heights sum up to the same total.

Yucca

Thank you for the sugestions. I'll have to take a closer look to CSS,
I'm not very experienced with it.

As usual, it would have been essential to post the URL.

Well, take a look at http://tline.sourceforge.net/example.html, this
is my project page.

Andre'