posted 07-06-1998 11:16 PM            

Here's the tip: Make sure you don't have any carriage return characters (Hex 0D or ASCII 13) inside of the table tag blocks: 'table' ... '/table'. The forum parser sees these and for some unknown reason inserts a break tag (br) for each one it finds. Even stranger, these breaks are placed prior to the start of the displayed table so you end up with a line of white space for each extraneous carriage return found w/in the (table)... (/table) brackets.

The extra carriage returns (Enter key) can get inserted when you try to make your HTML a bit more readable as you enter it w/in the little window you get for writing messages. Or at least thats what happened to me.

See the thread 'Factoid #8' in the General Forum. This has a table in it. You can view the HTML source by for this and all posts by clicking on the right mouse button and selecting the 'View Source' option. Study this and its displayed output and you can teach yourself HTML.

If you want to use a table in a message, I suggest you create the table with an editor (preferred) or HTML design tool and test your code locally under a browser. After you've got it just right, paste it into your message then test again. Remember the forum software reads your message and then translates that into its own HTML and sends its output to your browser. So anything you've done on your own needs to be double-checked within the forum to see what the translater/parser may have done to it. (Apparently this is regularly tweaked and fiddled with by the software's author, so what may not work today could be working at some point down the road.)

Someday when I've got a little time I'll create a generic table template that you can use via cut and paste to build your own. Its really pretty simple to get a basic table displayed. Alot of the fret work comes from making things 'prettier'.