Table help needed

Hi there

this is my first post, I have enjoyed the tutorials very much, now I need a bit of help.

I’m trying to design a layout with tables.
Please see the attachment to understand what I mean.

Cell 1 is meant to be 600 pixels wide.
Cell 2 is meant to be 200 pixels wide.
Cell 3 is meant to be about 150 pixels wide.
Cell 4 then should be about 450 pixels wide.

Now my problem is that when I pull cell 3 to make it narrower, then cell 1 inherits same width as cell 3. Cell 2 as well becomes as wide as cell 4, with an unwanted repetition of the background image.

My editor is Frontpage, others editors I have tried behave exactly the same way. Ideas?

Also I wanted to ask: are table still a good idea when it comes to making layouts?

Thank you in advance, Arte

I don’t pull. I manually type how big I want the height and width to be of each cell. I also use dreamweaver.

I’ve never had this problem since I started manually typing the values.

hi - if you try doing what you specify in one table, it ain’t going to work: each column in the table has to be a set width, and that width is set from the first row of the table, so if cell 1 is 600px wide, then any cells below it will have to be 600px wide. you’d need to make a ‘2 row,1 col table’ and then nest 2 seperate ‘1 row,2 col’ tables in each cell. that’ll sort it out

as for whether you should be using tables for layouts, well the long answer would be, it depends on your audience, and how important it is to you to comply with W3C guidelines. if you have an audience using version 4 browsers or earlier (increasingly unlikely), you’ll still be relying on layouts using tables and spacing images. otherwise, it’s arguably more ‘future-proof’ to use CSS for layouts, because that way you keep the content seperate from the presentation; it also becomes an issue if you need to make sites ‘accessible’ eg to screen-reading software or other web applications (webTV, PDA’s etc…)

Cell 1 is inheriting the same size as Cell 3 because you have them in one table. If you want Cell 3 to be an indivdual size, add another table under 1 and 2. If you prefer front-end more than back-end than use Dreamweaver. Tables still look good but CSS is of course really better. Better for you as well as for users since loading is faster. Coding is easier applied.

Hi,

yes MINIMALISTIK is right use manual typing height & width . This should be in persentage or in pixels and use nested tables. This will solve ur problem

G.P
www.sasnagarinfo.com