Tables - fixed layout - desperate lady needs help

Pammy · Joined: 15 Nov 2009 Posts: 1

Hi

I have been working on this all day, yes, it's Sunday and I'm all done in looking on the internet for help. I'm new at this marlarkey. I think, after five hours trying, I'm hoping someone will take pity on me and help. I need a table to send out as an email - one header, one main content, one side content and one footer. Does anyone know how to keep the main content on the left hand side static. When I insert text, the text makes the table go wider. My question is, how do I make the table content a fixed size. I just need everything fixed. Here's hopin' someone can help. If you have a template for me that would be fantastic.
Pammy

PayneLess Designs · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 4883 Location: MS

Hi Pammy:

That is the nature of table cells to expand according to amount of content. That's why tables usually should be used for tabular data as they were intended to be used.

If you couple your table with CSS, you can control the table cells much better by fixing sizes for each cell if need be.

Without your code to work with, it's hard to show you a good starting example. These might help:

CSS Tutorials:

http://www.w3schools.com/Css/default.asp
http://www.csstutorial.net/
http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss

http://htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/css/
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/character_famsupp_193.html

Tableless Web Design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableless_web_design
Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Images,_Tables,_and_Mysterious_Gaps

Web-Based Tools for Optimizing, Formatting and Checking CSS: http://sixrevisions.com/css/css_code_optimization_formatting_validation/