Friday, September 3, 2004 - Fri, 3 Sep 2004

In order to get the message list for a forum compressed into the top right area of an html page, I cannot show all messages at once. What I thought would be the best way would be to use a scrollable table. Way back in February, I found and saved this article on Creating Scrollable Tables using the overflow property of the DIV element in a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). It didn’t take too long to implement, but I found several problems with it. (1) I could not find a way of setting the position to start at in the table, so it would always start at the top. (2) I would have to load all messages into it. That might slow down the display of the page if the forum got to thousands of messages in size. But the worst problem was (3) that this overflow attribute was not supported in all browsers the same way. And some like Netscape 4.7 doesn’t support it at all. It looks like I’ll have to go back and implement it by displaying the messages in pages like most forums do.