The Bookies "Blam effect" of having a graphic at the top and bottom of a table cell is similar to what I've done with
this test table. The graphics are not that detailed (it's just a proof of concept), but it gives you an idea of what you can do with a 5x3 table. No CSS is used, but I set it up so that I could easily convert it to using a CSS file if the test worked (all the visible images are background images).
This is what I've found:
- The minimum size of the table is limited to the minimum size of the images that you want to see. The top left and bottom right image are 80 pixels each, and the corners are 10 pixels each. So the minimum width of a table is 180 pixels. At low resolutions 180 pixels for a menu or a Pal box equals a lot of wasted space.
- I could have made the top left and bottom right graphic smaller, but when start dropping below 80 pixels the effect of having something special on the table wrapper is lost (especially at high resolutions).
- The table does scale well, but if you use IIP PAL boxes will be a problem at low resolutions. I have the left hand column on my site set to 15%, and at 800x600 resolution the table in the test file is too big. So, at low resolutions the PAL boxes will not be proportional to the rest of the page. It's not a limitation of IIP, it's just the nature of designing graphics to fit within the limits of a table.
- Using percentages to set limits on the size of side bars is better than using a fixed pixels size, because percentages scale better.
There is another way to create the "Blam effect": Make a table that contains a single table row, a single cell, and place the graphic that you want to display in it. Set all table borders, cell padding, and cell spacing to zero. Set the alignment in the table cell to left. Place the html for your new table "wrapper" above the table code in the tbopen.tmpl file. Make another table for the bottom graphic, but set the alignment in the table cell to right. Place the script for it at the end of the table script in the tbclose.tmpl file. I'm not going to do it, cause I don't like the way it looks. The graphic doesn't wrap around the table, and on small tables it just looks odd. But it's the only way I know of to pull off the "Blam effect" and still manage a small minimum table size with a wide range of scalability.
I'm gonna experiment with some smaller graphic sizes to see if I can get the minimum table size down to 140 pixels (120 would be ideal). If it doesn't look good / scale well I'm going to drop 5x3 array tables in favor of 3x3 arrays (smaller arrays scale better, but the graphics effects that you can do are limited when compared to larger arrays).
Sorry for the rant, but I thought seeing how this worked would help some of you who are developing table wrappers on your own (maybe I can save you some time).
