Re: HTML 3.0 questions/issues

Jon_Bosak@Novell.COM
Fri, 20 Jan 1995 22:45:37 +0100

| > Also, what format are relative column widths in? Are they expressed as
| > a percentage of the total width (e.g. 50 being half the width) or are
| > they expressed as a floating point number (0.50 being half the width)
| > or what?
|
| I would feel most comfortable with using numbers representing the
| percentage of the final table width. This isn't critical though, as
| you can divide the numbers given by their summed value to obtain the
| fractional widths. Are people happy with a convention for percentage
| widths?

It's easiest for the publisher if you sum the numbers and divide to
find the relative proportions, because this is how the data comes
through in converting from desktop publishing formats. For example,
in converting a set of books published in FrameMaker you might get a
few hundred tables in which some of the column widths are specified
as, e.g., 12, 6, 3, 18 (where the author set the widths in picas),
some others are specified as, e.g., 144, 72, 36, 192 (where the author
set the widths in points), and yet others are specified as, e.g., 2.0,
1.0, 0.5, 1.5 (where the author set the widths in inches). Obviously,
a number of other units are possible. Summing and dividing covers all
of these cases, including the case where the widths have been set as
percentages or unit fractions.

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Jon Bosak, Novell Corporate Publishing Services jb@novell.com
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