Cell width as Percentage

[magicalwonders]

Hi Folks,

I tend to have my screen resolution set at 800 x 600 as my eyesight is not great. However, I've noticed that when checking the layout of my design at the higher resolution 1024 x 768 the change in look is not good.

I've managed to get around this by expressing the cell width of left and right columns in percentages. This seems to work rather well and so far, the design looks pretty much the same at both resolutions.

One question that arises from this concerns the bulk area of the page. Will it work to also specify this area as a percentage ? The recommendation in the guides is expressed in pixels at 550 or 600. Would 70% as an actwidth take affect?

I know I would also have to edit the act_productline and act_productbody, but I don't really want to go down that road if there's no chance of this working.

Does anyone know?

Many thanks,

Myles

[wjcampbe]

It is possible. The total of left percentage plus right percentage would have to be 30% for 70% to work - i.e 15% + 70% + 15% would work, 20% + 70% + 10% would work, but 20% + 70% + 15% would not. (see third para)

Any fixed padding and border settings would be taken into account first and it would be the remaining space that you are apportioning, so there will be a little variation at different resolutions, unless you change all your padding to % values too and adjust everything to keep the total at 100%.

Of course - if you already have % padding, then the sum of cell widths % + padding % must total 100%.

[magicalwonders]

Thanks Bill,

I'll give this a go and see what sort of results I get.

Many thanks,

Myles

[jont]

As Bill says - taking into account cell paddings may prove tricky due to Actinics love of nested tables from many many sources - may be worth opening a previewed page into say DreamWeaver to see where all the tables are and where they are coming from.

[wjcampbe]

Umm, not quite Jonty. Cell padding will not matter, coz that's inside the table. It's table padding that can cause a problem.

Unless table paddings have been changed to % then everything should work OK. The "I'm extra careful" way to try it would be, start with table width percentages that only total 90%, and then build up a little at a time till a problem occurs and go back one step.

[magicalwonders]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your input on this. Much appreciated. The softly softly approach sounds sensible. (Although knowing me I'll probably go for broke and see what happens!)

Am gradually getting shot of nested tables. Although when it comes to sections navs I'm stuffed as NQV:TOPLEVELSECTIONSTOP puts each link into its own table! Not much I can do about that though unless I replace the links with hand coded ones. Don't really want to do that with section links.

Thanks.

Myles

[jont]

Umm, not quite Jonty. Cell padding will not matter, coz that's inside the table. It's table padding that can cause a problem.

Depending on the theme there are nested tables sitting inside cells - giving that oh so annoying white space that always seems impossible to track down and remove.

Hopefully future releases will be fully CSS based and do away with nested tables