Re: DOCBOOK: Suggestion on navtowith, please

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 10:20:49PM +0800, damar thapa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This list was great help to me in creating my home page; thanks to all.
> 
> One more issue came up with my site ie the width of the side menu. 
> Seeing <xsl:param name="navtowidth">220</xsl:param> in param.xsl, I 
> inserted a image of 220 pixel long at the left side of the header to 
> align its edge (image's edge) with the edge of left menu beneath it. It 
> worked fine, but not for all menu items. When I choose some items, the 
> length of navtowidth goes crazy  -- choosing some item produces more 
> than 220, while others  shorter than that. Some browsers are better than 
> others (Mozilla-1.0 is better than netscape4.77, for example).
> 
> Can some one on the list point me to right direction, please?  Is it 
> browser issue? CSS  issue or some thing I have to do on xsl?

The tabular pages use an HTML table to lay out the webpages
as a one-row two-column table.  The left column is the
navigational list, and the rest of the webpage content is
in the right column.  The navtocwidth value is inserted as
a 'width' attribute in the left table cell element <TD>.
Since HTML tables are dynamically formatted, I think the
browser uses 'width' as a suggestion, rather than a fixed
value.  The other content can affect the final width of
columns as they are drawn on the screen.  And as you found,
different browsers handle it differently.  I don't know
how you can control a column width absolutely in HTML
for all browsers.


Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
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                                            email: bobs@sco.com