Topic awaiting preservation: CSS, min-width

I've this page that is almost ready to go. I've been working on it for a long time, and the first 'article' is almost finished.

When the window gets to be about 600 px wide, the whole thing falls apart. At 600 px, I would rather people get a horizontal scrollbar than see the main content suddenly disappear from their screen.

How can I do this, and still maintain a resonable amount of cross-browser compliance?

mobrul

mobrul: I'm a little confused as my answer to your problem would be what you have in the topic title. Does this mean you used min-width and it doesn't work (its not used on the page you link to)? Because if that is the case I'm a bit stuck and if min-width doesn't work then I foresee some serious problems.

[edit: I'm pretty sure I posted the link for mobrul but here are the details on min and max width:
www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visudet.html#min-max-widths

it should, hopefully, help with fluid floating designs that do fal apart when the width is reduced]

I was thinking about the NS4.x problem with the page and I suspect it might be possible to use @import to hide some of the styles from NS4.x or even set them in the main style sheet and reset them for more recent browsers in the @import CSS - worth a try as your page did hang together well in NS4.x so it something worth pursuing.

I look forward to seeing the page with content too!!

Emps


You're my wife now Dave

[This message has been edited by Emperor (edited 01-04-2002).]

Hmmmm...the first thing that comes to mind is why would the window be 600 pixels wide? I'd think you'd be safe at 640+.

I've tried the min-width attribute. I've tried attaching it to the body and I've tried attaching it to the 'main' div. Either way, the stupid middle section drops to 'regular' (non-floating) position when the window becomes approx. 600 px wide.
I know this is what it is supposed to do...I'm just trying to override it. It doesn't seem that min-width works.
My O'Reilly Dynamic HTML book reports min-width not supported by version 4 browsers. (It's an 'older' edition, so no word on newer browsers.)
Regardless, my IE 5.5 or NN 6 will not work min-width...at least not in this circumstance.

mobrul

mobrul: Interesting problem - can you show me a version with min-width. Its possible that something else is interfering with it or there is another problem. It is an important problem and it seems like it isn't a well supported style (well that throws some ideas I've had out of the window!!). Have a look at Glish's main page which uses min-width on the content box:
http://glish.com/css

and that doesn't work in IE6.

Take a look at:
www.westciv.com.au/style_master/academy/browser_support/page_layout.html

and:
www.richinstyle.com/bugs/table.html

It appears that this is only supported by Moz5/NS6 which is annoying but as other browsers will have to support this it is worth sticking with (I must admit to being disappointed with IE6 on this front). Have you tried something like white-space: nowrap:
www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#white-space-prop

I don't think its going to give you the answer you want but it might be worth a try until all browsers stop sucking (and its the only other answer I can think of). The problems of being at the leading edge I suppose.

Emps


You're my wife now Dave