Sent by Jukka K. Korpela on 25 November 2004 15:03
On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Lysanne Lessard wrote:
> I've solved pretty much everything (on PC, still working on Mac), but I have
> a problem with the "The VCH suggests" box. When the title of the course has
> long words, they just run off into the background in FF.
As expected, when the minimum width required by the content exceeds the
width you have specified for the element.
> I've tried to give everything a width,
Actually, that's part of the problem. When you set widths in pixels, you
cannot even estimate, still less know, whether some text fits in.
On IE, different problems arise when the font size is increased by the
user, since IE (incorrectly) widens the block instead of letting the
content overflow. The morale? Set widths for text boxes in em units. Yeah,
it makes visual design more challenging.
Using _larger_ width (while still using px) would naturally make the
problem appear less often, but here it's a bit difficult without changing
the layout or making the minimum requirement for browser window width even
bigger. Maybe the screen real estate could be used differently, since now
there are large empty areas. Perhaps you could put the course catalogue on
the left under the navigation menu there, and make that part somewhat
wider.
> It's ok
> in other browsers because they cut at the hyphen.
Whether cutting at a hyphen is OK is debatable - it's surely not right
for expressions like "-s". But the practical way to suggest that such a
break is permitted is put the tag <wbr> after a hyphen in HTML markup,
e.g. auto-<wbr>apprentissage. This however requires that the content is
monitored by someone who edits it as needed, and it doesn't solve the
problem of very long words without hyphens. You could try manual insertion
of "soft hyphens", ­, but this is unreliable.
> The problem of long words not wrapping is actually something that often
> gives me trouble. Is there a way to "force" this?
No, not force and not even "force", but you can suggest permissible line
breaks in a manner that most browsers notice.
> (especially for long URLs!)
The practical approach is avoid URLs in page content, using names of
documents in the content and URLs only in href attributes. Naturally this
applies especially when the width has been limited.
> P.S. I know not everything validates yet although the WAI logo is there, but
> the problems will be fixed withing the next week.
Oh, the WAI logo is quickly becoming a symbol for "this site is designed
for accessibility checkers, not for disabled people" anyway, so it doesn't
matter that much if it's even technically incorrect.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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