Post widths

[Sonic 0]

Is there a way of keeping all posts the same width, despite people posting stupidly long words (eg Here )

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It's like something out of that twilighty show about that zone

[ernokaikkonen 0]

I don't think so. At least not with html. There's no way that I'm aware of to force a word-wrap in the middle of a word.

One solution would be to validate the input and break any excessively long words in the script, but that's far from optimal.

[hooked 0]

Isn't there somewhere under/in the preferences you set for page width in 'my dz'? I thought I remembered seeing something like that there.

J

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Sometimes we're just being Humans.....But we're always Human Beings.

[ernokaikkonen 0]

It wont help if someone does this:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[narcimund 0]

What Erno is saying is this is a limitation of the language HTML itself. There is no command or function that can be used to tell HTML, "break long words."

What can be done is to break the words programmatically. However, that involves deciding how far to take the project. At its simplest it's a big deal to write into all sorts of functions the intelligence to look up some ideal character count from everyone's records, then count and adjust every word's characters before shoving them to the screen.

Even at its very, very best however, it's still going to make some stupid choices and break words in silly places. That's because the program can know how many characters a word has, but not how many pixels the word will span on your screen. That's because you and your browser control the size and typeface. Also, letters are not predictable widths: "i" is not the same width as "m" in most typefaces.

In other words, this is one of those systemic problems with HTML and the way the web works. Sorry.

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[hooked 0]

Okay. Thanks. You learn something new every day!

J

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Sometimes we're just being Humans.....But we're always Human Beings.

[Sonic 0]

There should be a way of limiting the width of the box that all the text goes in though. If it exceeds the width of the others, break the text at that point

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It's like something out of that twilighty show about that zone

[narcimund 0]

Quote

There should be a way of limiting the width of the box that all the text goes in though. If it exceeds the width of the others, break the text at that point

That would be nice, but I tried to explain why it's not possible. If you have any questions, I'll try to explain further why the nature of the world wide web doesn't provide what's necessary before you can do this.

Perhaps if the entire site were converted to java...

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[ernokaikkonen 0]

>Perhaps if the entire site were converted to java...



Using CSS instead of tables for the layout would have quite a few advantages. The attached file demonstrates this. I don't know if newer Explorers render it correctly, IE5.0 doesn't. The overlong word should "bleed" outside the containing boxes without disturbing anything else in the layout.

testi.html

[narcimund 0]

Nice fix. IE 5.2.1 under OSX.2 renders it the way you intended.

CSS is great as long as you're willing to sacrifice the browsers that do something unexpected.

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[PhreeZone 15]

IE 6.0.28 On XP SP1 it is still broke

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[ernokaikkonen 0]

Actually I think that may be my fault. I forgot that if I don't include a DOCTYPE definition in the file, many browsers revert to a "quirk mode", trying to parse the file like older browsers.

If this version doesn't work in IE6, I get to blame MS and Bill.

test_valid.html

[Craig 0]

same as Phree's specs. except IE 6.0.26 is not correct with the new test either.

EDIT: my bad, I have installed no SP's