Make Your Own Web Page Using Netscape Composer 7.x
Add a Table to Your Web Page
The use of tables for Web page layout is very widespread. While there are other ways to do page layout, those are still little used (because of varying browser support). They also require more advanced coding knowledge than Netscape Composer generally demands. The good news is that making tables in Composer is a pretty easy task!
You can start making a table by going either to , or clicking the icon (circled above). Either way, you'll wind up with a window like the one below.
Start off by going along with the defaults: we'll make a table with rows (which are horizontal, in ComputerSpeak) and columns (which are vertical). We'll also keep the border at , which means 1 pixel. Let's look at the table's width a little more closely though.
When you click the drop-down arrow (circled above), you'll see you have the option of either pixels or percentage of window. are simply the tiny dots of light that make up images (and even text) are your computer's monitor [click here to skip the explanation].
Computer monitors are set to different , which really just means that they're set to show different numbers of pixels. The most common resolution on PCs right now is -- 800 pixels across by 600 pixels up and down. Other common PC resolutions are , , and even (the first number usually denotes the width, while the second usually refers to the length).
What this means is that, if you were to specify a width of, for instance, pixels for your table, it would overflow many people's monitors. (Since Web usability experts know that Web viewers really hate to scroll to the right, so that's definitely not a great idea!) On the other hand, if you specified a width of, say, pixels, it wouldn't overflow anyone's screen, no matter how low the resolution -- but it would hardly make a dent in a screen with resolution (it would be less than a third of the total width available).
Using a percentage for a table's width, then, has the advantage of being the same proportional width regardless of the resolution at which it's being viewed. But this has problems of its own, as usability experts have also discovered that Web visitors don't like to read very long lines of text. The truth is that the decision you make here varies, depending on the purpose of the page, how you want it to look, and especially on your personal preferences.
Whew! Having explained all that, let's choose a pixel width of 590 for our new table. You should now see 4 cells the same size in your table. Let's pretend we're filling out a menu for vegetarians, with alternatives for carnivores. In the first column (up and down) type . Click in the cell immediately below it and type .
In the second column, type , and in the cell immediately below that, type . Your table should now look something like the one below.
Looks like we need some headings, so put your cursor somewhere in the top row of the table, and go up to the menu. Choose , and voilà! there's a brand-new row at the top of the table. Add some headings at the top of the table: for the first column, and for the second column.
There's just one more thing we need to do to make this table functional, if not beautiful: let's put a heading on the whole table. Click in your new top row and choose once again. Since this is a heading for the entire table, we want it to span entire width of the table, so click and drag from right to left, in the latest top row, to select both table cells (there will be boxes around both when they're selected, as below).
Now go to . That's all there is to merging cells! You can do the same thing in columns, and to as many cells as you'd like. Now you can type a heading in that single merged cell, something like .
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