Impact of providing exact sizing for the page elements as opposed to the browser resizing tables

Question

Hi we have a application of huge amount of data which is to be converted into HTML tables via Velocity templates.Question1: One area to be focussed is the impact of providing exact sizing for the page elements as opposed to the browser resizing tables height and width want to understand how much time is spent by the browser doing that as opposed to creating a page that exactly sized for 1024 x 768, for example

Question2 :The page actually loading is a chart with lots of graphs and cells with in a grid which depicts 15 min interval of day which is micro version of the data. So the grid cells were constructed to put '*' value inside the grid. Is there any better way of doing this.

Answer 1

Question 1:

If your document is data intensive as you portray it to be, it would be beneficial to allow for the flow [auto-resizing] of your display markup [layers/tables] to take into consideration those with larger display areas [Above: 1024x768]. You might want to consider defining the smallest possible width/height through layers+css or placeholder images to keep from over-wrapping by those with display areas that are less than the intended 1024x768.

Example:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
    <tr>
        <td width="25%"><div style="width:200px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;clip:rect(0px 200px 1px 0px);" title="Column Space Saver"></div></td>
        <td width="75%"><div style="width:400px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;clip:rect(0px 400px 1px 0px);" title="Body Space Saver"></div></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td width="25%" valign="top" style="background:#EB0000">Will be 200px or 25%, whichever is greater, and always adhere to those parameters even if my screen size is smaller than combined 600px [hence column is 200px body is 400px].</td>
        <td width="75%" valign="top">Will be 400px or 75%, whichever is greater, and always adhere to those parameters even if my screen size is smaller than combined 600px [hence column is 200px body is 400px].</td>
    </tr>
</table>