Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Name

width — NN 4 IE 4 CSS 1

Synopsis

Inherited: No

Sets the width of a block-level or replaced element’s content (exclusive of borders, padding, and margins). Internet Explorer 4 applies the width attribute only to selected elements and absolute-positioned elements (which means DIV wrappers around other types of elements), but CSS2 recommends application to all block-level and replaceable elements as well.

Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 react differently to settings of the width style attribute. One thing they agree on is that if the content requires more width than is specified for the attribute (an IMG element’s width, for instance), the content requirements override the attribute value (use the clipping region to truncate the width of the viewport for the element if you need to). But if the window is narrower than the specified width, Navigator tends to shrink the width of the element to fit the window width (to a point) so that the window doesn’t need to scroll horizontally; IE 4, on the other hand, preserves the element’s width setting regardless of the window width.

A number of other discrepancies between browsers (and between operating system versions of the same browser) plague the width attribute. For example, if you create a DIV element whose width is 300px and nest a P element inside whose width is set to 200px, Navigator 4 respects the narrower width of the P element, but Internet Explorer 4 causes the P element to fill the 300-pixel width of the DIV container. You ...