Bryan,
Regarding the recent suggestions regarding shortening text in bookmark and/or message lists:
First let the tables, and probably their columns, shrink and stretch to fit the user's browser window and the text.
Inappropriately constrained tables or columns are causing some of the problems.
For example, the dates that take four lines to display are caused (partly) by constraining the width of the date column. If it were unconstrained, browsers could balance its width against the width of the other columns so that dates wouldn't take four times as many lines to display as other field values.
Only the browser knows how wide the user's window is, how many pixels the actual text on the user's screen is, etc.
(Web authors shouldn't be trying to set text column widths in pixels, because they can't possibly know ahead of time the width of text on a user's system, which depends on the browser, the user's browser preferences, the operating system, the system configuration, and the display device.)
Free the tables! Free the browsers (to do what they can do)!
Make sure your web developers know when and how to remove WIDTH="..." attributes as well as how to apply them.
Daniel |
