No, I mean simply that no horizontal bars appear in Safari, FF,
Opera and some other browsers when the browser window width has
run out of room to show the 600px that is specified for that
first cell. Whereas iCab says, "There's no room left to get the
600px in and the other right cell, so I will provide a scrollbar"
Please tell me if this is not so on your versions of FF, Opera,
etc. (I realise you might not have iCab)
No you're right again, and I must stop talking such rubbish.
Yes, to confirm this, if you set a width of 600px on one cell you
effectively set the "preferred" width of that cell, which contributes to
the preferred width of the whole table. But the actual width the table
will get is a compromise between its preferred width, the available
width, and its content minimum width. If available is less than
preferred, then that 600px cell will have to shrink a bit.
If you put a verylongwordwithnospaces in that cell, you will find that
it will not shrink to smaller than the space needed for the word, and at
that point you will get a horizontal scrollbar.
This is what FF, Opera, Konqueror all do, but you're saying not iCab,
which treats the 600px effectively as a minimum width as well as as a
preferred width-- it treats that cell exactly as though it contained a
long unbreakable word that required a 600px wide cell.
If however you set style=width: 600px on the _table_ rather than on one
of the <td>s, it will get at least 600px and so you'll get a horizontal
scrollbar when you make the browser window narrower, even when there's
nothing much in the cells.
[...]
iCab stands alone on my machine in this respect. It shows
scrollbars in response to the code of the url above as described.
None of this is really specified in much detail, but CSS 2.1 has a
"non-normative" section (17.5.2) on automatic table layout which says:
2. For each column, determine a maximum and minimum column width
from the cells that span only that column. The minimum is that
required by the cell with the largest minimum cell width (or the
column 'width', whichever is larger). The maximum is that
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
required by the cell with the largest maximum cell width (or the
column 'width', whichever is larger).
The bit I've "underlined" justifies what iCab is doing, but it's not
what anyone else does.
