[Wylug-help] HTML/CSS table width

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 03:05:39PM +0100, Gary Stainburn wrote:
> Dave, This was the solution I'd arrived at myself, butI wanted to avoid 
> including extra HTML, such as the COL tags every time I used the table class.

Fair enough, so long as you are avoiding HTML for the right reasons.

HTML is supposed to convey data, metadata, and structure.

Arguably, the col element is metadata and structure rather than
presentation ... although poor browser support has tended to see it used
mostly to hang presentational HTML attributes off.

N.B. standards browsers typically preserve designer-specified box sizes
when content exceeds the space available ... IE often fails to, because
the box in question has the 'hasLayout' property set to 'true'.  

The hasLayout property can be 'true' under all sorts of ridiculous
conditions, but most table components have it by default:

  http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html#elem

Note, that col doesn't.

Dave