[TYPO3-english] How to change to three columns?

[bernd wilke]

Am Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:24:34 +0100 schrieb Xavier Perseguers:

> Hi Ronald,
> 
>> When I do that on my sites, nothing changes, since I have the menu on
>> top (some sites at the left side) and the paragraph uses the full wide
>> of the screen.
>> 
>> How can I do that (the easy way)? Can you point me to an example? Any
>> thoughts/disadvantages?
> 
> If you want to keep your text as such and display it on 2 columns, then
> you need either CSS3 that has a concept of columns for displaying the
> text or an extension that split your content on 2 or more columns
> automatically.
> 
> I do not know of any extension that does this but you may search for
> "columns" on http://typo3.org/extensions and see whether something
> matches your needs.
> 
> Most multi-columns extensions provide in fact a design where you have to
> split manually your content onto multiple columns. Perhaps there is an
> extension to make this for you although I would say that the best
> solution in terms of accessibility would be to use CSS3 built-in method.
> Problem is that there's a great chance that many browsers wont
> understand this CSS3 configuration (but may well-degrade though).

as an author of one of those extension I was fascinated by the thought of 
automatically slitting into two or more columns. But doing it inside of 
an extension is nearly impossible, as it neeeds to calculate sizes of 
content which only the browser know how big an element is.
doing on pure text is nearly possible, as you don't know the exact size 
of characters in the used font (as you don't know what font/font-size the 
browser will use).
Having more than pure text (html-tags, which are invisible, but may 
result in size-changes or images) you can forget to calculate splitting 
borders.
The only possible solution which will result in nearly correct splitting 
is using Javascript to change the content (DOM) of your webpage. (There 
are some scripts available)

but good news:
if you use CSS3-splitting you will have splitting with browsers which 
understand it. other browsers will just show normal content in one single 
row, as they ignore the 'unknown' CSS-statement.

bernd
-- 
http://www.pi-phi.de/t3v4/cheatsheet.html