Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/05/06 15:35

David Segall wrote:

> To cater for the increasingly drastic variation in screen widths I
> decided to follow the usual printed page solution and display the text
> in columns.

HTML doesn't support this "newspaper style" column flow model.

Not unreasonably, IMHO. HTML is largely a screen format, and it assumes
certain things about screens such as them "typically" being only wide
enough for a single line of text and that single-axis scrolling is
easier to manage than multi-axis scrolling. Although HTML does have
lots of non-screen behaviours too, these two constraints are pretty
fundamental to it. If we accept them, then mutli-column newspaper style
columns aren't a good idea.

If you really want it, do it with XSL:FO (which does support it)

If you want it in HTML, then you have to set your own explicit column
breaks, which IMHO is throwing away most of the point of having it,
certainly as regards good fluid design. You could even do this
automatically, from XSL:FO. Sticking floated <div>s side by side works,
as would using a <table>.

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