THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700

June 18, 1999

04 00067 61 99062101

Mr. Dave Raggett
dsr@w3.org
Style Sheet Development
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Subject:

W3C HTML for Tables

Dear Dave,

Thanks for an excellent explanation of HTML.

I am trying to build a fairly complex table. Two questions seem to pop up as more thorny than others...

1. What is a "pixel"?

   I found your section 6.6 that refers to C..., but that source did not seem to have an explanation of pixel. I appreciate that a pixel is similar to pixel in PCL, but how many pixels to an inch. If we specify 500 pixels wide, or 15 pixels high, what does it mean?

2. How can we specify the height of a cell?

   Evidently the height attribute for td is not supported by Internet Explorer. Spacer command is not supported by IE, although it works in Netscape. Is there another way to specify "white space" for positioning content in a cell, something like the example below?

   We can use div to position "Company ABC" horizontally, but how can we position it vertically. Spacer and height could be used, but don't seem to work in Netscape and IE.

3. Can rows and columns be "nested"?

   In the example, below, rowspan 2 for the first cell, and a nested row for the second cell displays "Proposal" and "Approved" correctly. The 3rd cell also works, because it also has two rows, but the 4th cell wraps back to the left margin.

      /------------------------+-----------+----------+------------\
      | Organization           | Proposal  | Duration |            |
      |                        |           |          | Approving  |
      |     Company ABC        +-----------+-----+----+            |
      |                        |  Approved | Mon | Yrs|   Agency   |
      |                        |           |     |    |            |
      \------------------------+-----------+----------+------------/