Thursday, January 13, 2005

Superficial Changes

As you can see, I've made a few changes to the blog template. Links to other blogs are now on the left. On the right, I've added a "Greatest Hits" list, for those days when you're jonesing for more Agoraphilia than Tom and I have had the energy to provide. Suggestions are welcome.

I would like to force the middle column to stay in frame when you shrink your browser window, i.e., make sure the left and right columns disappear first. If anyone knows HTML coding that will accomplish this, please let me know. (The table is already centered, so that's not the issue.)

4 comments:

Glen said...

Play with your "Width=" table tags. You currently specify the whole table has Width=950. Don't do that. Just remove "Width=950" from the TABLE description. Also remove "Width=650" from the TD that corresponds to your middle column. If you don't specify the width of the table, it will resize to the space available, if it has the freedom to do that. Despecifying the width of a the middle colum gives it that freedom. After those two changes, the middle column should resize to fill the space available while the sidebars maintain their fixed-width nature.

Glen Whitman said...

If I do that, won't it cause my sidebars to be visible *always*, rather than disappearing when the browser window shrinks? I'd rather not have the text column get squeezed down to one word per line.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like removing the sides for viewing the window cascade might be an impossibility. Unless, somehow, a toolbar command or options icon can select to change the view.

Glen said...

Well, if you decontrol ALL the column widths, the browser will attempt to negotiate some reasonable compromise to keep everything on the screen. Then the side colums could shrink to one word wide too. But you're right that it wouldn't hide anything.

If you really don't like the left column taking up space, why put it on the left? Move the info to the right or to the bottom and call it a day. The top and right are -- by convention -- what shows up when the window is too small to show everything.

What I find annoying is fixed-width columns that assume I'm reading with full-screen windows and force me to scroll horizontally if I want to read to the end of a line. Letting the middle column shrink does fix /that/ problem. So I gave you the solution for a problem you didn't ask to solve.