Megan — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:56:26 +0000

Just remembered another user for the spacer.gif - providing information to alternative devices via alt tags. One use for this is to use a spacer.gif as a "skip navigation" button for screen readers. Regular browsers don't see it, but people who are using those devices won't have to listen to all the navigation being read, they can skip right to the content.

As a sidenote, I had the chance to try out a screen reader for the first time last week. Are those things ever fast! I mean, they read things so fast that it's hard for a sighted person to digest what the software is reading. They say that people who have vision impairments have improved hearing, so they don't have a problem with the speed.

cordedpoodle — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 03:56:13 +0000

Suzanne,

My customer has several tag lines that describe the business they are in. They wanted to have these tag lines on their home page.

At first I put these tag into an image so as to keep the proportions of the home page. They are pretty big so I can't see anyone zooming.

However they are in the middle of the design surrounded by other elements and I guess I do want to keep the proportions, and I guess it's a little bit egotistical.

It occurred to me that I might be able to get a bit higher of a ranking on google if the tag lines matched the meta tags (therefore the taglines have to be readable).

Megan — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 13:20:21 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by cordedpoodle
"designers need to let go of the idea of forcing things to look *exactly* the way they want them"

Could you elaborate?

I think that in the early days of web design a lot of assumptions were carried over from the print world. Designers didn't really know how to approach the new medium by itself so they related it to an older medium they were familiar with. In print, you can make things look exactly the way you want them to. You can position something a precise decision from something else, you can make your text exactly a certain font and size etc. HTML isn't that precise. So one of the things that people did to get around it is used spacer.gif's to get things positioned where they wanted them. Even non-print designers picked up on this. It was just the way things were done then.

Now, it is true that CSS has evolved far enough now that a lot of old work-around are no longer necessary. I remember having to use spacer.gif's to get a border around something! Regardless, the new web design paradaigm embrases the fluid nature of the web rather than trying to work around it. It's doing what HTML and CSS can do, rather than trying to make HTML do what print can do. It's a different way of thinking.

Suzanne — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 22:47:09 +0000

Height is valid in the HTML for lower language levels, for TD and for TABLE. It is valid in CSS and works in higher levels. In both cases the contents of the table or cell will expand the table or cell if they are bigger than the allotted height, but with CSS you can set overflow to none or hidden, which effectively truncates the content. (Support, per usual, can be varied.)

To answer the first part -- why do you want/think you need a static height? As a designer, this seems to be engaging in ego-decisions, not user-oriented design. If it's a static height, and someone zooms their text, they will lose the content.

Now with CSS, the height is determined relative to the containing element, so things like 100% are really 100% of the window, not 100% of the page.

But if you want 100%, that's not static, eh?

So, what do you want to do and is it really necessary or is it some designer arrogance at work?

cordedpoodle — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 21:06:34 +0000

Thanks for the info and the site. I've run into his site before but haven't read deeply yet.

Not to be argumentative, it's obvious you know more about web design than I do, but I'm curious about your statement:

"designers need to let go of the idea of forcing things to look *exactly* the way they want them"

Could you elaborate?

Also what I need for my project is a way to make a cell or table's height static. That, as far as I know can't be controlled by HTML or CSS, at least across all currently prevalent browsers.

JeevesBond — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 14:44:22 +0000

Oooh, and the first link is: http://www.alistapart.com I love that site.

Megan — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 13:21:08 +0000

I think the solution is designing more fluid layouts that don't need to be forced to be a certain width. This could be done with CSS or tables. I think that designers need to let go of the idea of forcing things to look *exactly* the way they want them. We need to accept the more fluid nature of the web and design things accordingly, rather than relying on assumptions from another medium.

I also don't think that current browsers have a problem with collapsing widths so it's not an issue anymore.

About CSS, it's not really unreliable if you know how to do it right. Read Jeff Zeldman's blog for examples of layouts designed using CSS. He posts links quite often (and his site is a good example as well).

JeevesBond — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 10:47:42 +0000

Even before using XHTML/CSS I didn't use or need spacer.gif's that's why I was asking about them, no excuse for lazy shortcuts IMO

Renegade — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 10:25:07 +0000

If you want a table to be a specific width then do this:

Or, if its for a TD

One draw back I can think of at the moment with using a spacer.gif is that the site will look strange when you have images turned off by default (which I have in IE5).

cordedpoodle — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 06:31:04 +0000

I'm actually looking for a solution for a table or cell now that I need to be a specific size and I was going to post the problem so a CSS or DHTML solution would be great.

I guess I'm getting behind again. Sigh.