Scripsit Steve Swift:
Quote:
I'm trying to achieve a format of definition lists that matches the
definition lists generated by IBM's "BookMaster" (from quite a few
years ago).
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I have no idea of what that might be. But the rendering issue is a CSS
matter, not HTML, hence off-topic in this group. The HTML perspective is
limited to the choice of markup. This might be affected by styling
possibilities; generally, <tableis easier to style than <dl>. And since
the <dlsemantics is vague at best, as discussed recently in this group,
there is no particular benefit from using it.
Quote:
The effect is as if the terms and their definitions are in a two
column table, all cells vertically aligned.
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So why don't you use a table?
Quote:
But I'd like to achieve
it with a combination of <DT<DDand CSS
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Why?
Quote:
so that the result *looks*
like this:
<TABLE>
<TR VALIGN=BASELINE><TD><B>Life<TD>The meaning of life
<TR VALIGN=BASELINE><TD><B>Liff<TD>The meaning of Liff
</TABLE>
>
I've missed out all the closing tags to avoid line splitting, but the
above works in every browser (I'd be interested in exceptions, but
that's another topic).
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Do you really think that the current behavior of the tag soup slurpers that
you have tested (probably a small fraction of browsers around) is an excuse
for omitting the required </Btags?
Quote:
I've done some research, and tried a few samples, but I seem to have
stumbled on the "simplest concept that is all but impossible in CSS".
So far, all I've learned is the CSS for "put this in some weird and
inexplicable place"
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CSS is discussed in c.i.w.a.stylesheets. The short answer is that you are
just making life more difficult to yourself by refraining from natural
<tablemarkup and trying to produce tabular look using CSS. In theory, CSS
lets you do that, using declarations like display: table, i.e. turning the
stuff into a table... but this isn't supported by IE.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 
Definition List format adjustments 
