Busy — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 22:04:44 +0000

Tables are the sure fire way, The way Megan Jack and Brian Farkas tell it, works, and is the easiest way. One slight change to Megan Jacks method thou, if you have lots of links, graphics (icons, banners etc) or a generaly slow loading page, you should seperate the top table cell so it loads first and gives your viewers something to see.

absolute top right corner cell
flexible top middle cell
absolute top left corner cell

absolute right side
flexible middle cell
absolute left side

bottom right corner
flexible bottom middle
bottom left corner

layers can be used but isnt as full proof, plus layers can be turned off on the browser resulting in your page being one big mess. Layers also arent widely accepted - the good ole browser wars.

Tables is probably one of the scariest parts of learning HTML (if you learn it) but really is quite easy and once you know it you wonder how you ever made web pages without it.

Megan — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 16:13:16 +0000

This is what your code would look like then:

<table width=100%>
<tr><td width=150>absolute top right corner cell</td>
<td>flexible top middle cell</td>
<td width=150>absolute top left corner cell</td>
</tr>

<tr><td width=150>absolute right side</td>
<td> flexible middle cell</td>
<td width=150>absolute left side</td>
</tr>

<tr><td width=150>bottom right corner</td>
<td>flexible bottom middle</td>
<td width=150>bottom left corner</td>
</tr>
</table>

Of course, you would change the width=150 to whatever you need, and add the spacer.gif's in the fixed width cells for netscape.

I know that you can do flexible width sites with layers but I'm not sure how to do that exactly. I think it's usually easier and more reliable to use tables in this case.

Lonewolf — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 14:43:05 +0000

Hrmmm i have a site like this though (sorrry for my ascii skillz

      _________
     |_|____|_|
     | |    | |
     | |    | |
     | |    | |
     | |    | |
     |_|____|_|
     |_|____|_|

I have a top area for the sites logo & a banner add, a lefthand sidebar, righthand sidebar and a bottom bar... no way to do this with layers?? there alot easyer to work with

Megan — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 14:33:55 +0000

Yes, a basic layout could be coded like this:

<table width=100%>
<tr><td width=200> fixed width left side navbar
<img src="spacer.gif" width=200 height=1> Transparent gif 
makes sure that the table cell doesn't resize weirdly in 
Netscape)
</td>

<td> Flexible content area will expand to fill the rest of the screen
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Brian Farkas — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 06:29:08 +0000

Lonewolf, welcome to TWF!
You should be able to accomplish this by using percentages instead of fixed widths in your table cells. For example, instead of setting a width of a column as 300 pixels, you could simply make it 20% (or any other percentage).

If you just wanted one area to expand, you could make the other areas fixed widths, in pixels, and set the expandable area width to 100%. That is what I did with intersurge.com, and it seems to work fairly well.

Good luck, please let us know if you have any more questions.