Operation Audacious Phoenix

So this is a long-time grievance of mine and, I know, many other bbcode users who obsessively customize and organize their profiles with columns.

So as we know, each column's width is dependent on how much content it contains. The columns' width is dynamic, which makes them great for things like putting images beside blocks of text (without the janky flow and guestbook-breaking capabilities of left and right aligned images), or, my personal favourite: putting several collapse-tags side by side and having the columns' width re-adjust depending on if a collapse tag is open or not.

HOWEVER, the dynamic columns cause all sorts of trouble whenever anyone wants to align lists, or unequal sets of data in a standardized fashion, etc. etc. Which is what most columns are used for in a 'formatting' sense. Usually what ends up happening is we have to use [ color=transparent].............[ /color] to force equal widths, and then this breaks between themes and... Yeah.

So I'd like to propose two 'types' of columns. This could be done by letting you add a property to columns (ex. [ columns=flow] versus [ columns=fixed]), with 'flow'-following the conventional dynamic reflowing capabilities that we know and love (CSS table-layout: auto), and 'fixed', a variant that instead sets the table-layout property to 'fixed', forcing the column-width to instead be dependent on the total number of columns used. This will always in evenly-spaced columns, regardless of the amount of text in any one column.

Flowing Columns
Fixed Columns
I'm sure there are some bugs this might introduce (especially nesting a fixed column inside of a flow column...), but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Edit: Stringently re-edited my post to try and make it clear what I'm describing.

Tables are abysmal to try and support for mobile. I'm super unlikely to do any BBCode that encourages them.

I'm working on native support for columns built right into the new profile editor right now, though, which should clear this problem up super drastically.

I don't mean actual html tables, I am merely using a term stand-in to differentiate them from what we already know and expect from columns. Would fixed %-width columns cause issues? I know the dynamic ones will stack if the mobile device is too narrow. I'm guessing that's the issue then with a fixed width?

I know native-columns were mentioned in another post, but I was assuming you meant that it would allow you to align two widgets next to each other.