Show Tabular Data

at 11:59 on 10 August 2006, paul haine wrote:

This seems pretty absurd to me - a lot of work and some fairly dodgy practices (using readonly input elements to display data, inline event handlers, fixed column widths) - for a very minor problem - and is the 'problem' of differing cell heights really that big a deal for anybody? Would they really prefer to have to manually scroll inside each cell instead, one at a time?

at 20:02 on 10 August 2006, Carlos Bernal wrote:

In the era of standards...this is a sloppy technique.

at 21:11 on 10 August 2006, Brent wrote:

I think I get what you're trying to acheive, but wouldn't it be much simpler to set a width and height and overflow to hidden?

at 21:51 on 10 August 2006, sam wrote:

I think it's a solid idea. I disagree that the problem is minor. When developing a dynamic (data-based) page, there are times when the values can be of any length and sometimes they get much too long for the available space. In this case you either truncate the text (bad) or you have to come up with some snazzy way of making the entire text/description/title/name available to the user.

Now, as for his techniques, they are a bit dodgy/sloppy, but I think it is probably worth improving upon for all you super-duper programmers.

at 22:16 on 10 August 2006, David wrote:

where is the finished example?

at 23:51 on 10 August 2006, paul haine wrote:

"In this case you either truncate the text (bad) or you have to come up with some snazzy way of making the entire text/description/title/name available to the user."

Or you increase the height of the table cell, while perhaps using vertical-align: top in your CSS to keep things neat and tidy. If it's a dynamic, data-driven table then you probably can't guarantee the height of the page or table anyway so the possibility of it 'not fitting in the available space' seems remote to me - the page should already be able to accomodate it.

I just can't see how that solution is not preferable to this bizarre combination of script, form fields and unintuitive widgets and behaviours. Can you imagine actually trying to read lots of data like this, having to scroll each cell that had overflown?

David - there's a downloadable zip mentioned on the last page of the tutorial, that contains the finished example.

at 13:53 on 11 August 2006, Patrick Robin wrote:

I can't realy see the point in this, not only is it extremely clunky in it's execution, it's not that intuitive and breaks if javascript is disabled.

I'm also wandering how often the problem of text with no spaces being too long for the containing cell actually occurs, or indeed why this method is prefereable to using overflow: auto and having scrollbars on the cell?

at 00:32 on 12 August 2006, Bill Snebold wrote:

Arrows don't appear in correct place in Safari. I agree that this solution is a clunky one.

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