Expanding (X)HTML

[Alan Kellogg]

I know you can simulate columns in text by using tables, but there are a few problems. Such as a cell expanding the more text you add. So I have a proposition;

1. Lock the cells. Set the size of the cells in then lock that size. The cell is then limited to the number of characters one may add depending on the size of the cell, the font family, the font size, the font weight, the font style, and other relevant things.
2. Lock the table. Set the dimensions of the table, then lock them. Attempting to add anything more than what the table can hold fails.
3. Automatic carry over. In the case of a cell anything over and above is placed into the cell immediately to the left of the first cell, or into the first cell on the left in the row below the one. When the current cell is the last one in a table to covers the page (whatever the page dimensions), the table in question is copied on the next page and entries continue as before. (Any table copied has the settings of the original.

In addition, I recommend adding a specialized table, to consist of one cell (though it can have additional cells if your formatting calls for it), to be set to the size of a sheet of paper---either a standard size such as American Legal or British A4 plus margins, or a custom size---giving the writer a text area material may be added to. But once the "page" is full a new "page" is created where the work can continue. Note that this means a link would be added on the old page to the new one. I'm suggesting this because I'm tired of web pages that go on and on and on (and on and on and (on and on))) until the Moon is about to enter the Earth Roche Limit and break up. And that's a long time away.

 

What do you think?

 

(Note that not everybody uses a small screen to visit the Web, and sometimes a large browser window means really long lines of text. Naturally my suggestion would have to be responsive to screens or windows of various sizes. Besides which, I want to be able to present pages on my site that look like the pages in a book or a certain format.}

[Ingolme]

CSS already splits content into columns without needing tables: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_column-count.asp

Using tables to place content in the right positions is a bad practice. You can use a <div> element if you want to surround something in a box with a specific width and height.

 

If you plan on making things fit an A4 paper, I recommend creating a PDF document, HTML is specifically for web content and not entirely intended to look perfect when printed.