Blanks or hidden words to fill the space

[John]

Hello all,

Was wondering how to best tweak something on my webpage.

If you look at the source code for
http://www.lakecountycfc.org/news/index.htm, since the left column is so
long, I had to put the dreaded <p>&nbsp</p> tags in there on the right hand
column to fill up the space.

Is it better to do a bunch of <p>&nbsp</p> tags, or one <p></p> with a bunch
of lorem ipsum text in it equal to the background color?

I have tried several of the methods that balance the columns, but when I
throw the outset borders around each div (I like that look), the
bordered-boxes do not align.

So there is a bunch of blank lines I need to throw into the code to balance
things out. What is the best/approved way to fill up space?

VR/

John

 

[Andy Dingley]

since the left column is so
long, I had to put the dreaded <p>&nbsp</p> tags in there on the right hand
column to fill up the space.

No you didn't. You're starting with a fundamental misunderstanding,
then asking us for details about how best to implement a basically
flawed idea.

Why do you need to add bogus content? What's the problem with one
column being longer than the other?

If you mean that you want the columns to always look the same height,
then there are techniques to do that. One obvious one is to use a
<table> -- if you're insistent on "things next to each other" being the
same height, then you're implicitly calling for table-style rendering
and you're better off being honest and up-front about it.

There are also ways to do it purely with CSS, but really I'd want wider
browser support for max-height before I went down that route. OTOH,
it's only cosmetic if it isn't supported, so why not?

Best of all is to use something other than HTML that really does
support this style of column layout and page flow (XSL:FO can do it
easily, if you wanted PDF output) -- but these are obviously
impractical for the Web.

Putting empty padding in there is _never_ a good idea.

Is it better to do a bunch of <p>&nbsp</p> tags, or one <p></p> with a bunch
of lorem ipsum text in it equal to the background color?

I don't know. Is it better to bang your head on the wall, or on the
floor?

 

[Harlan Messinger]

Hello all,

Was wondering how to best tweak something on my webpage.

If you look at the source code for
http://www.lakecountycfc.org/news/index.htm, since the left column is so
long, I had to put the dreaded <p>&nbsp</p> tags in there on the right hand
column to fill up the space.

Is it better to do a bunch of <p>&nbsp</p> tags, or one <p></p> with a bunch
of lorem ipsum text in it equal to the background color?

Neither. What you're missing is the CSS "clear" property, which causes
an element to which it applies to drop below any currently outstanding
floated elements.

<p clear="both"><b>Need Help Viewing ...