A useful formatting option for web-pages are tables. This is a brief
exercise designed to get to know them. Tables can be used for more
than simply listing tabular data. They are oftentimes used as a
formatting feature. If you look at my home-page
(www.rose-hulman.edu/~wollowsk), the formatting of the two columns is
done by an invisible table. Go back into Netscape Composer. If you are
already in Netscape, select Communicator and then
Composer. If you want to create a similar effect, do as
follows.
Click on the Table icon, which is located on the right-hand
side of the editing menu bar. This will bring up a window.
Let's start simple. Create a table with one row and two
columns. Align the entire table in the center. There are some
other formatting features that you may find interesting and that I
encourage you to explore at a later time. If you click on OK, you
should get an empty table on your web-page.
If you right-click on the table you get the chance to edit a cell,
row, column, or the entire table. For now, select Table
Properties.
In the window that pops up, make sure that the Table tab is
selected. Unselect the check-mark to the left of the Borderline
width box. Click on Apply and OK. In your
web-document, you now see an outline of the table.
Cut and paste some text into the left cell and cut and paste
something else, may be a picture, or some more text into the right
cell.
Select the text in one of the cells and experiment with the
alignment. The alignment button can be found in the upper right corner
of the formatting menu. If you right align everything in the left-hand
cell and you left align everything in the right-hand cell, then the
text meets in the middle. So how do we get some space in the middle?
We simply add a third column in the middle which we use to
separate the two existing columns. New columns are added to the right
of the currently active cell.
Click on the left-hand cell and then right-click. In the window
that pops up, select Insert and then Column. Then click
somewhere in the center of the newly added cell so that the cursor is
noticeably in that cell. If it isn't, things are gonna be ugly.
Now, right-click on the cell so as to get back to the window with
which to edit the table. Select the Cell tab, inside of it,
place a check-mark in the box to the left of the Cell width
item and experiment with the setting. Try 10% first, but also
experiment with pixels. Both have their use.
If you like what you have feel free to FTP the edited web-page to
your AFS account.