Martin Joh said:
The practical problem is this. I am trying to avoid the use of
pictures in order to fit all formating and data into a single html
file, which are btw automatically generated by another program.
You are only describing a wrong attempt at attacking some unspecified
problem, not the original problem itself, and you didn't post a URL.
How do pictures come into the picture, and how is the single HTML file
idea involved? You are just listing unrelated concepts.
One
of the problems is scalable brackets
Brackets?
around content depending of the
contents of the hosting table, like the example below. Note that the
contents may be another table with a lot of contents etc.
<table>
<tr>
<td>(</td><td>contents</td><td>)</td>
</tr>
</table>
Don't try to scale parentheses, or brackets for that matter. Setting the
size would be just one of the unsolvable problems.
Why should the contents appear between some huge parentheses? Having no
idea of what the page really contains, I can just suggest that you should
probably use some borders around a block. With the given snippet, there
is no reason to assume that you need a table at all. You could simply put
the contents inside a block (<p>, <div>, whatever) and suggest left and
right borders for it in CSS. Or if you really want to use just HTML for
that, you could do so too, using the less widely known attributes of
<table> (basically <table frame="vsides" border="3">, for a single-
cell table, for some value of "3").