LYNX-DEV standards status of <TD "WIDTH=xx%"> ?

[Bela Lubkin]

Please see http://www.armory.com/~filbo/sco_links.html for reference.
This is a copy of someone else's web page, which I have preserved in
case they change it.

The page contains a table with three columns.  Each table element is
introduced with:

  <TD WIDTH=33% ALIGN=CENTER> contents-of-element </TD>

What is the status of this "WIDTH=" tag, with respect to various HTML
standards?

One of the recurring reasons stated for Lynx's inability to render
tables nicely is that it cannot determine column widths in advance.

Here is a mechanism by which the page author can *state* column widths,
inline to the table.  In this case Lynx could simply allocate 33% (best
approximation) of the available row space, and render the contents of
the element (as much as will fit).  The referred page would fit, with
perhaps a couple of characters lost at the end of a couple of the
elements.  Since it's in terms of percentages and since we can choose to
render the elements incompletely, this doesn't require horizontal
scrolling.  Another possibility is to do as Netscape (3.01Gold) does:
wrap the element within its column space, i.e. add extra display rows
below the first one:

 ================ ================ ================ ================
  column 1 row 1   column 2 row 1,  column 3 row 1   column 4 row 1
                   which is a bit
                   longer than the
                   column allows
  column 1 row 2   column 2 row 2   column 3 row 2   column 4 row 2
  column 1 row 3   column 2 row 3   column 3 row 3   column 4 row 3
 ================ ================ ================ ================

but that's quite a bit more complex.

Meanwhile, I've hacked the page up to display "better" under Lynx.  It
is a bad hack job, and I know it, please don't jump on me.  ;-}  That's
under http://www.armory.com/~filbo/test_links.html.  It's pretty under
Lynx (2.7.1-ac0.23 and 0.97), passable under an old Mosaic 2.4 I have
around, and passable under Netscape 3.01Gold.  Netscape insists on
moving blank lines out of the table, so you see a big blank area above
the table; I couldn't see a way to prevent that except to remove all
newlines in the whole HTML source for the table, which seemed
unreasonable.

>Bela<

-- 
Sandy and Bela Lubkin are traveling around the world for a year!  Now posting
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Our stories and pictures are at: http://www.armory.com/~alexia/trip/trip.html