TINY TABLE TIDBITS

Written by: FLO
October's two questions were:

  1. How can you make a table into a link that'll work for both MSNTV and computer viewers?


  2. When do we use the table attribute "bordercolor"?

  • Extra Tidbit! Ways to indent whole paragraphs, plus place images inside table cells with the same tags.




1. "HREF-ING" A TABLE
DON"T make a table into a hyperlink (hot link)!

Why not? I'm a webbie and I ALWAYS use tables as hotlinks!

If you're making a webpage that computer users will see, as well as webbies, then you'll have to change your "href-ing" ways!

MSNTV's browser recognizes tables as hot links. Computer browsers won't load a table that is a hot link.

So how do we get around this?

Easy--just make the table and a cell as usual. Put the link inside the cell around the cell's contents. Now computer browsers, as well as MSNTV's, will recognize the hot link.

Well, how about an example? How do I code this?

<table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5">
<td width="100" height="50" bgcolor="#E54E1A" align="center" valign="middle">
<font size="1">Back to the</font><br>
<font size="3"><a href="index.html">TRIBUNE</a></font>
</td> </table>
Back to the
TRIBUNE




OR: Take some buttons to Image Magick and composite the appropriate text on them, or stick the text above or below them, as I do below:

Home Back Next
The images make up the contents of each cell.
Put the href's around the image tag, NOT around the cell tags!

Refer to Tom Landrum's Table Href Tute for more info and tips.




2. BORDERCOLOR
Bordercolor is a table attribute.

What? That's a new one on me! I've never used it, yet I make tables with colored borders all the time!

Do you make pages for computer uses to see and do you use tables on those pages?

Well yeah, sure. So what do you mean?

About 75% of people online use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) as their browser. And it's strange, but the IE browser doesn't translate a border color the way the MSNTV browser does. If you stack tables to make a multiple border of 2-3 different colors, all the IE viewer will see is blank borders the same color as the page bgcolor.

Ooooh! So you mean we have to use that strange attribute called bordercolor if we want IE viewers to see our colored borders?

Sure. It's easy. Here's a simple table tag:

<table bgcolor="#000066" border="5" bordercolor="#000066">


See, that's all ya gotta do! The IE browser will now see the same dark blue border color as MSNTV viewers see.




EXTRA TIDBIT

I've noticed some people put several paragraphs in a table and they've indented one paragraph. How do they do this?

First let's talk about the paragraph regular tags: <p> and remember, it needs to be closed </p>. This tag inserts a double line break between paragraphs of text, or if you put it around an image tag, it'll do the same spacing for the image. There's another paragraph tag: <p style="margin-left:20px">. This tells the browser to indent the whole following paragraph 20 pixels in from the left side.

The MSNTV browser indents more than the specified 20 pixels from the left side of the page. Don't know why!

This paragraph is supposed to be indented 100 pixels from the left side of the page, but again it is much more than that.

This time 40 pixels are specified.

The blockquote tags will also left-indent a paragraph for MSNTV. As you can see, this tag causes less of an indentation for the MSNTV browser than the <p style>: tag does.

Unfortunately, MSNTV users have no tag that will also indent paragraphs from the right side, too. Computer browsers indent both sides with the <blockquote> </blockquote> tags.

FOR IMAGES: the first is placed using the
<p style="margin-left:50px">

This is <p style="margin-left:100px>

And finally, <blockquote>

Since this whole section on indenting is a cell of a table, you can see how you can place images anywhere horizontally inside of a table cell. In the body tag, add the following: fontsize="small" ("medium" or "large"), depending on how you have set the text size for your user.





Question #1: How can we table some "different" tree ornaments
or other fancy stuff for the holidays?

Question #2: How can I cut down on file size when I have a lot of cells in a table?

Tune in next month, December, for the answer!

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