Forum:Table formatting

I think we should settle on a common standard for formatting tables, specifically how to set up their width. I don't know about you, but a page like Fallout 3 holodisks looks more neat to me than e.g. Fallout 3 quests for the simple reason that the columns across all tables on FO3 holodisks have the same width. I think there's not much of a controversy here.

The main question is whether tables should be set up as percentage or absolute widths. If you're not all that HTML/CSS-savvy, you basically set a table to be a certain percentage of the available space (e.g. "80%") or you can set it to be a fixed width no matter how wide the available space is (e.g. "500px").

The advantage of percentage widths is that they completely adapt to any browser window size or screen resolution a user might have, making the best use of the available space. That's also their disadvantage though; on wide-screen displays they look drawn out, on very low resolutions they are barely readable because the browser moves the cell content vertically when there's not enough space and they can result in a strange look when combined with manual line breaks (mostly on low resolutions, when the available space makes additional automatic line breaks necessary). It's also hard to judge how wide columns need to be made; what looks fine on your screen might not on somebody else's.

Fixed width tables do not adapt, hence avoiding the manual line break and wide-screen issues (although it's probably debatable whether a small table with a lot of whitespace beside it is better-looking than a drawn-out table). They also remain readable on low resolutions, but they cause a different issue there: they clip over the right border of the page (to see what I mean, look at Fallout 3 holodisks and resize the browser window horizontally; if you make it small enough, you'll see it).

Opinions? Use percentage widths or fixed widths? -- Porter21 (talk) 12:45, February 20, 2010 (UTC)


 * Myself, I prefer percentages. Ausir(talk) 14:16, February 20, 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm for percentages, too.--Gothemasticator 03:04, March 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Percentages it is then. I think it's mostly overview pages which need to be changed, I'll take a look when I get the time. -- Porter21 (talk) 10:19, March 23, 2010 (UTC)