html page layouts with a table

acid_kewpie · 06-19-2003, 02:26 PM

howdy howdy howdy, i'm asking a question!

Is there anyway to let html code, e.g. a table, draw itself out without paying any attention to the size of the page? I have a situation where i am drawing a table which needs to fit precisely inside a window, but I want the content to define the size of the window. Sadly i'm coding an intranet that only uses IE, and can't find any other way to accomplish this as ie values such as document.body.scrollwidth just increase to the entire width of the page, so to get a suitable value I am resizing the window to (100,100) and then getting the scroll value. but of course resizing it makes the table details wrap. I've combatted this for now with some <nobr>'s and other padding but this sucks. any way to stop this happening? in a div or something?

Or alternatively will a div potentially be able to shrink to fit a table when the entire page won't? I fundamentally want to get the size of an unadultered, unrestrained, unwrapped table. possible?

Any other way I'm too dumb to think of?

[for drew] mock version of the page: http://thirtythreeandathird.net/blahblah.html
as you can guess if you make the page smaller than the table it wraps. if you make the page larger, there's no way to find the width of the table.

david_ross · 06-19-2003, 02:49 PM

If I understand you correctly:
How about drawing the table, finding it's width then resizing the window to that width.

acid_kewpie · 06-19-2003, 02:55 PM

Quote:

finding it's width

but how? only way i've found is to make the page smaller than the table and reference scrollwidth for IE, which causes the table to distort. I've found plenty of great ways to resize a popup to fit an image, but an image won't resize itself if in a confinded space, text, and therefore a table, will.

Proud · 06-19-2003, 03:16 PM

You want the table to fit the windows? width="100%" ?

david_ross · 06-19-2003, 03:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by acid_kewpie
but how?

Create a table with a full width row containing a DIV with an id - set the width to 100%:

Code:

<TABLE>
<TR colspan="2"><div id="width" style="width:100%;height:1"></div></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>Cell 1</TD><TD>Cell 2</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

Then to read the width to a variable (will be in pixels):

Code:

var width = document.all('width').clientWidth;

You could also do the same thing with a blank gif or somehting instead of a DIV.

acid_kewpie · 06-20-2003, 05:24 AM

ahh that's great. i'm still originally opening the popup first time to a guarenteed larger size, but on the whole that's a great impreovemtn, thanks!