Controlling Table Size

Setting a minimum size in a free-flowing design

[jimh009]

Hi,

This is a really basic question but I still can't figure this out. I'm developing my first "free flowing" site. Everything looks fine in resolution of 800x600 or greater. The four primary table are all set to 100% in size. However, my main navigation bar is a graphic image that is 730 pixels in width. If a visitor has a screen resolution less than 800x600, what happens is that all of the tables flow to match the browsers resolution except for the navigation bar table - which holds the graphical navigation bar. Needless to say, this looks strange (as the navigation bar "sticks out" from the rest of the layout) and I would like to get this fixed.

So, my question is, how do I set a minimum table size for all tables in a "free flowing" site design. Thus, I would like the site to have a minimum size of say 780 pixels in width, but allow it to be free flowing on all screen resolutions that are set higher.

I'm using Dreamweaver to lay things out and generally use CSS to control the size of interior tables.

Thanks.

Jim

[tedster]

You can use min-width, and (because IE doesn't support min-width) use an expression in the CSS to make IE calculate the minimum width. Here's a thread about doing the same for max-width [webmasterworld.com], but the principle is the same for min-width.

An alternative (very simple, but definitely a bit of a kludge) is to put a spacer.gif that is sized 780x1 somewhere invisible in the layout - maybe at the footer. That would force scrollbars very easily whenever the window size goes below 780px, rather than allowing the parts of the nav bar to break into several lines.