Feature Requests and Suggestions Thread

I thought I made that clear? I was hoping you'd come up with a solution. I ended up having to drop out to a C program where I did the formatting and padding and bring it back in and it still never worked well.Shucks. I thought I was going to learn some new tricks.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I hadn't considered trying to solve any problems not already addressed by HTML, since the dBCodes (their new name) are just a meta code on top of HTML tags.Addressing just one of your issues, it seems that formatting numbers to be lined up on the decimal point would be easy. Naturally you'd have to use a fixed width font, else just the variable digit width would throw off the formatting, but otherwise you'd just do this. I'm going to create a table with the numbers 1004.3, 29.57 and 1.2946, and I'm going to get the decimal place smack in the right place every time: Click on "raw text" to see how I did it. It would be easy to have the board software do this for you if you select the right mode. After all, who cares how many tiny number formatting tables the software creates. I would have to define modes for the [f] tag, maybe along the lines of Excel formats, but this, too, would be easy.--Percy

Hi Jar,A little while after I posted the previous message I became curious if others had developed other approaches to the same thing that might be simpler, so I began poking about the web and found a reference to an align attribute value called "decimal". Giving it a try here with my same set of values: It doesn't work in IE, and after exploring a bit more it appears that it might not work in any browser. Does it work in the browsers you're using?--Percy

No it doesn't for IE 6, Foxfire, Maxthon, Opera or Avant.ps: I have a big question in the Admin forum. Can you check in there and see if you can help me or drop me an email?

Some other sites limit how many characters can be used in the signature field.parsimony comes to mind as a principle here -- if you can't say it concisely try something else.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

um... a centered 80%?(p align=center) doesn't work on qs boxes or images ...?

works for images

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nor in netscape. your first one did - stick with that if you have to have it.I would have the default be as shown in the last sample with the next level being able to chose right, centered or left justifiedperhaps in the header fields? hr, hc, hl? hd for the decimal aligned? each column would be set by the header alignment?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

hm ... I distinctly remember trying it only to have the image stuck on the left side (why I went to images inside qs boxes or used indent)

okay. you got me.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

In a table there is still the issue of typing. Unless you can place some internal logic in the design to do formatting or create data types that are pinned to the column it gets very difficult.For example, if you have the original example that worked it will not handle alpha entries such as N/A or M/D gracefully. In addition, most tables will be a mixture of material that needs to be left justified, right justified, decimal justified and centered. In a decimal justified column you also need to be able to handle the implied decimal, "." separators, "," separators and to logically tell whether it is a decimal or thousands separator.It is not a simple programming issue and one that is elegant when finally done well.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

decimal versus comma ... especially when dealing with european demarcation systems ...

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

also works for boxes, as you can see above.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Rather than creating new tags for each alignment or format, I'd instead add modifiers, e.g., [h]. Formats would be inherited by all other fields lower in the same column, unless otherwise specified. Font settings would not be inherited.You also mentioned comma as the decimal separator, and this, too, is easy. The only difficulty I can see in making tables flexible and useful is the sheer number of possibilities. This only means a lot of typing of code, not thinking, so it isn't hard.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

One tack I've used successfully in the past is to define seperators in the header to be inherited. That way it's typed once. There are really only two choices there (unlike in date fields).Ain't programming fun?

looks like I got egg on my face. must have mistyped the coding. (I like to spell align with two L's, and for some reason the coding doesn't work then ...)

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}