7.10 MULTICOL Element (Netscape 3+ only)

MULTICOL specifies text do be displayed in multicolumn format. THe COLS (= a number) attribute specifies how many columns to use, whlie GUTTER specifies the space to leave between the columns, in pixels. WIDTH specifies the width of the collection of columns, either as an absolute width in pixels, or as a percentage of the available width.

Almost any BODY element can appear inside MULTICOL, but some, such as BLOCKQUOTE, can lead to odd formatting due to the browser's miscalculation of text lengths within the columns.

MULTICOL is allowed inside MULTICOL -- but don't get carried away, or the text will look ridiculous!

MULTICOL only works on Netscape Navigator 3.0 and greater. Here is an example of MULTICOL:

<MULTICOL COLS=2 WIDTH="100%">
<P>
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language 
used to create hypertext documents that are platform 
independent.  Initially, the application of HTML on the 
World Wide Web was seriously restricted by its reliance 
on the ISO-8859-1 coded character set, which is appropriate 
only for Western European languages.  Despite this 
restriction, HTML has been widely used with other languages,
using other coded character sets or character encodings, at 
the expense of interoperability. </P>
<P>
This document is meant to address the issue of the
internationalization (i18n, i followed by 18 letters 
followed by n) of HTML by extending the specification of 
HTML and giving additional recommendations for proper 
internationalization support.  A foremost consideration 
is to make sure that HTML remains a valid application 
of SGML, while enabling its use with all languages of 
the world. </P>
</MULTICOL>

Which is displayed as: