Formatting HTML is often a maddening exercise. Browsers all have their own mind and would refuse your every attempt to size things right. Specifications offer little help here. They are either too vague or too technical. What is completely lacking are test suites and examples.

I ran into a problem where I put a very long string (a URL) in column 1 of a table. Opera and Mozilla treat it as an unbreakable string. Rather than break it down and format it within the column boundary I specified, they expand the column far off the right side of the screen and completely displace column 2. I have exhausted every trick to break the line to format it reasonbly. Then I found an very thorough article Word division in IE about this subject. It even have test results with Opera. Great article but I still don't find answer to my problem.

Finally I resigned by swapping column 1 and column 2. This seems quite satisfactory since the later part of the long string is as interesting.

2004.06.29 [web] - comments