How to detect table width or height?

[Dennis]

Is there some way --using, say, DOM or javascript-- to detect the
current pixel width and/or height of a relatively sized table or of
one of its columns or rows. I'm going to be writing javascript to
adjust my page to the viewer's browser window dimensions and this
would sure be great information to have.

Thanks ....
Dennis

[Steve Pugh]

ji*@jibbering.c om (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:40:06 +0000, Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net > wrote:

If the scanning of the eye [...] and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

I understoof the pixel was defined with reference to the distance from
the eyeball, please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's how it's defined in the CSS spec. But no browser that actually
uses that definition has ever been sighted, much less caught and
brought back for study.

Steve

--
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I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net > <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Barry Pearson]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi >
wrote:

Dennis wrote:
We have pretty much anything from 1 bit
101x86 pixel screen (some cellurar phone with XHTML browser) to
2000x1500 pixel stereo display with 30 bit color (high end 3D
workstation ) and *the same* document or site should adjust to both
displays.

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem), it's just
too difficult, a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.

[snip]

I agree, but I also believe that there is much more to this than the total
size of the display.

Content often has inherent size, too. A GIF, a PNG, a JPEG, or a form for
input, is often designed for a particular width. The designers of the web site
had a vision in mind, in which this element occupied X% of the width, and that
element occupied Y% of the width. People who can only change the HTML & CSS
are ultimately limited.

The designers envisioned the overall viewport. They had a view of some X-box
Y-column layout. They said "let's have this form fitting in here; let's have
this image fitting in there". So people deliver such content to be authored.
And authoring has to make do with what it has.

If authoring allows the viewport width to dramatically change without
horizontal scrolling, the relationship between the inherent sizes of that
content and the viewport width can become silly. Perhaps that form designed to
occupy X% of the width of the viewport suddenly occupies 110% of it, or 1% of
it.

In order to accommodate support of very different viewport widths, we also
need much more scalability of content. SVG to replace lots of image content.
Perhaps JPEG2000 to support much more scability of photographic content. Etc.

Text is inherently scalable. Very little other content is. The page design is
typically constrained by its unscalable content. It makes sense to design for
a certain size, so that all the unscalable content fits into it. And 800 x 600
is the obvious choice at the moment. But in 5 years time ...?

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[I V]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:39:02 +0000, Steve Pugh wrote:

ji*@jibbering.c om (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:40:06 +0000, Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net > wrote:

If the scanning of the eye [...] and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

I understoof the pixel was defined with reference to the distance from
the eyeball, please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's how it's defined in the CSS spec. But no browser that actually
uses that definition has ever been sighted, much less caught and
brought back for study.

Well, yes and no. The CSS spec says that, "If the pixel density of the
output device is very different from that of a typical computer display,
the user agent should rescale pixel values," and then gives an explanation
of a 'reference pixel', which is presumably intended to aid anyone
implementing such a rescaling. It _doesn't_ say, at least as I interpret
it, that a CSS UA has to interpret pixel lengths precisely using this
reference pixel. So, a browser intended for desktop use which uses screen
pixels as CSS pixels, regardless of the DPI of the screen, is, I think,
doing what the CSS spec says it should.

--
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girl I once knew. Where's your sense of wonder?
- Currently flowing into a sanitary napkin... Guess where my childlike
innocence and idle dreams are currently wedged. Come on, I dare you."
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[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem)
The problem is the number of characters per line, not the number of
pixels. I need a larger than average text size and an 800px width
restriction often _causes_ readability problems.

Something you don't mention is that many of these sites that used a
fixed width layout also use multiple columns, plus they tend to set
microfonts. After I override their silly font sizes so I can read it,
there ends up being only a couple words per line in a column. IMO, this
is a far worse readability problem than lines that are a bit long.

With a fluid layout, at least I can adjust my window width to help
readability when I need to. Can't do that with a fixed design,
especially a table-based layout, which many of these sites are.
a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.

OK fine, but if that content is text, set a max width in em or ex units,
not a fixed with in pixels. Use the right tool for the job, and all
that jazz.

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[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:08:33 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@si hope.com>
wrote:

With HTML, I have control over text size. I can make text whatever size
it needs to be for me to read it. Flash can't do that.
You can put your own font buttons on your flash movie and change the
font size that way. Admitedly, it would be slicker if the user's
existing browser settings would do that automatically.

Ah, I see now that you are going for "slick". Usability and
accessibility normally take a back seat in these cases. I have never
seen a Flash site that had any kind of font user control, probably
because if the author really cared about this, I doubt they would have
used Flash in the first place.
But just out of curiosity, what do you do about graphics?

I could care less about eye-candy. Photos aren't normally a problem
unless the dimensions are tiny. Graphics that masquerade as text are
the only real issue. Turning off image loading helps only if the author
uses appropriate alt text. Many do not. In these cases, the browser's
back button works quite nicely. ;)

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[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem),

I believe it's common enough for authors to choose it as a
default suggestion.

If it were simply a suggestion, it wouldn't be so bad, but the huge
majority of these 800px wide sites use table layouts, often nested
tables. Few browsers let the user disable table support and attempts to
get around table width issues via user stylesheets generally don't work
well.

BTW, we all know that fixing font-size falls under the evil heading,
right? So what makes fixing page width OK?

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[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:46 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@si hope.com>
wrote:

Jim Ley wrote:

I believe it's common enough for authors to choose it as a
default suggestion.

If it were simply a suggestion, it wouldn't be so bad, but the huge
majority of these 800px wide sites use table layouts, often nested
tables.

That's still a suggestion, we can do nothing but suggest on the web.
Sure user agents are poor in this area (like they're poor at other
things) but that does not, nor should it invalidate the idea of
suggesting widths.

If we don't suggest anything that some UA's are poor at - we're left
with nothing to use at all, we certainly can't use CSS which user
agents are almost entirely atrocious at.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javas cript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:27:10 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@si hope.com>
wrote:

So what are the relevant commands that tell you what the user's
preferred text size is?
But are you familiar with the zoom feature in Flash?

Yes, and it has serious flaws. I have submitted bug reports to
Macromedia, but there have been no improvements, nor do I really expect
any. Seems it's not really important to them.
With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.
And why would I need to zoom everything? Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content? Or is maintaining your
pixel-perfect layout more important to you than my ability to read it?
Page zoom, like Opera does, has more drawbacks than benefits to me, and
the Flash player's zoom has even more drawbacks than Opera's. I'll take
just plain text zoom any day.
So images (which aren't affected by
the user's preferred text size) also get magnified for the user's
benefit. It seems like kind of a wash in my opinion.

It is not a wash by a long shot. If you ever _had_ to use it, you might
agree.

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[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:20:56 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@si hope.com>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:

With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.
And why would I need to zoom everything?

because Flash like other graphics formats uses position for
information, just changing the size of one part of the text could
dramatically change the meaning of the document. (e.g. in SVG where
you stupidly can override text size in CSS
http://jibbering.com/2002/8/text-mixup.svg )
Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content?

It's rather ridiculous to suggest that people only use vector (or
other) graphics for eye candy, there are a lot of things you simply
cannot do in HTML, that you need to use graphics for.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javas cript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:20:56 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@si hope.com>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:

With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.

And why would I need to zoom everything?

because Flash like other graphics formats uses position for
information,

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either. More like he
wants total control over layout, which Flash will definitely give him.

Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content?

It's rather ridiculous to suggest that people only use vector (or
other) graphics for eye candy, there are a lot of things you simply
cannot do in HTML, that you need to use graphics for.

I'll agree that there are some things that cannot be done (well) in
HTML, but the overwhelming majority of Flash sites do not fall into this
category. Most probably shouldn't be using Flash at all.

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