Good ol' newspapers

[ronnyengen]

[Batalf]

[ronnyengen]

Hello Alf,

Being a developer myself I would be glad to give you any assistance you might want, though countrary to you, I have never felt "100%" comfortable with the untyped fashion of client side web development . I am more of a server side guy.

To the best of my knowledge this functionality is part of CSS3, and mozilla has some work going on in that direction (e.g. look at ). Furthermore, doing some more research yielded "a hit", the International Herald Tribune seems to be having a solution similar to what I described, although images seems to be left out (e.g. see the "sub-articles" of ) .

Anyway, let me know if I can help you in any way!

Until then ,"God Jul og Godt Nyttaar".

-------------------------------------
Update: More research, see links"

1)
2)

the (2) link actually has quite a good workaround for doing what we wanted (they even have an example with an image), perhaps their implementation can be improved , e.g. embedding a paging function, so as to avoid having to scroll up and down all the time (As they had implemented in the International Herald Tribune approach).

[Batalf]

Hello Ronny,

Thank you for those links.

There is no direct CSS support for this yet, so it has to be some kind of DHTML script that splits it into columns. I'e a script that dynamically creates the columns as you can see in your link http://www.csscripting.com/css-multi-co ... mple2.php?. There, I assume they are using <p> tags where float is set to left in the CSS.

I'll see what I can do with this. You will hear from me if I need any assistance. Thank you for the offer by the way.

Merry christmas and happy new year to you too

[Batalf]

[ronnyengen]

[kimss]

I agree to "ignore" Firefox on this one, since most users use IE anyway. I suspect we are talking of use in comercial websites or a commercial CMS anyway, which really makes it important to work in IE.

Sure - I use Firefox myself, but out customers don't, so we need IE.

This sollution doesnt sound very complicated when thinking of it, though in practise it might be much more complicated - sure. Firstly i would think that this system would need some sort of kerning, so that we can compensate for different font types and different font sizes in some way. Most likely we will be using Verdana or Arial - so the functionality could (doesnt have to) be made with this in mind, making some rules makes the goal easier to acomplish.

I would think that if we are talking of 12px size in text and verdana we could quickly determine how many characters in general that fits on say 5 lines of 120px width. Doing a 5 line calculation narrows the kerning and linebreaking that might occur on some words. But the main problem is as mentioned with the images.

I would think that we need to parse the entire text and pick out all the images so that we can modify them. We must deside that if content are split into 120px coloumns, an image can or cant be larger than 120px. if larger then we need to resize it and remove possible align. If we want align we must be sure that the image is small enough to have a practical use in the text, meaning probably resizing it down to max 50px in with or something.

Surely this can be solved, but doing all theese calculations in javascript Im not sure off - to me it sounds much better doing this serverside before pushing the content to the browser.

But it sounds like a good idea however, now I gotta run to purchase some christmas gifts,

regards,
Kim Steinhaug

[Batalf]

Thank you Ronny and Kim.

I have to think about this during christmas.

A solution might be to calculate height of content by using offsetHeight, i.e. create columns, check height of columns and move words and paragraphs between columns until we're satisified.

Images could be supported if they have a height attribute. This attribute could be parsed by Javascript. Without a height attribute it's more difficult since we have to wait for the image to load before we know it's height.

Happy christmas to both of you!

[ronnyengen]

Alf and Kim,

I'll try to dig deeper into csscripting's solution over xmas, and see how it can be improved. Their solution is quite good to start off with, only (-) I found at first glance was the way columns would stretch in height beyond the screenheight.

Till then, God Jul!

BR