HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Always make sure that embedded elements in columns are small
enough to fit within your columns, even on fairly small browser displays.
H.2.1.4. The style and class attributes
Use the
style
attribute with the
<multicol>
tag to create an inline style
for all the content inside the tag. The
class
attribute lets you label the
section with a name that refers to a predefined class of the
<multicol>
tag declared in some document-level or externally defined stylesheet.
H.2.2. Multiple Columns and Other Browsers
As we've noted, the
<multicol>
tag is supported only by Netscape ver-
sions 4 and earlier. Fortunately, when other browsers encounter the
<multicol>
tag, they ignore it and render the enclosed text as part of the
normal text flow, usually with little consequent disruption to the docu-
ment.
The only problem is that the contents of the
<multicol>
tag flow up into
the previous flow, without an intervening break. Thus, you might con-
sider preceding every
<multicol>
tag with a
<p>
tag. Netscape 4 won't
mind, and other browsers at least perform a paragraph break before
rendering your multicolumn text in a single column.
It is possible to emulate the
<multicol>
tag using tables, but the results
are crude and difficult to manage across multiple browsers. To do so,
create a single-row table with a cell for each column. Place an ap-
propriate amount of the text flow in each cell to achieve balanced
columns. The difficulty, of course, is that the "appropriate amount" var-
ies wildly between browsers, making it almost impossible to create mul-
tiple columns that are attractive on several different browsers.
If you must have multiple columns and can tolerate your columns re-
verting to a single column on incompatible browsers, we recommend
that you use
<multicol>
.
