If there's any chance of the list items wrapping, as one does in your example, then you're asking the impossible. Even if you could calculate which items were going to wrap server-side, it'd fall apart on text resize. Maybe with CSS 3 multi-column support, but not with the current crop of browsers.
However, this could be done with JavaScript triggered on page load: . Intitially, set the container with no height, and the ul the width of a single column . Sniff the heights of all the list items . Tot up the list item heights until they go over the proposed height of the container . DOM insert </ul><ul> at the appropriate break . Remove or hide any list items that don't fit . Float all the lists left . Set the container height . Call the procedure on text resize. There's another article on ALA that explains how to do this. A framework like Mootools would make this kind of thing fairly painless, but you will lose some backwards compatibility. As further discussion of JavaScript would be off-topic for this list, maybe someone can point you in the direction of a good JS list if you decide to pursue this course. <snip> This is my first post to css-d so please bear with me. I have a very specific situation and I feel there definitely must be a solution that I just can't figure out. Server-side code is generating a list of items for me, and I want to display the list in fixed-height, fixed width columns, i.e. items would go down the first column and then flow to the right. I am picturing an article flowing between linked textboxes in Quark or Pagemaker. Here is a page that describes what I want to do... http://donzacharias.com/listflow.htm Basically I want the list to show as many items as will fit in a certain pixel or em height in column 1, and then continue to the right. This List Apart article comes very close to what I want to do http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlists but I don't want to do a fixed number of items in each column; I want to fill up as much of the column as possible before flowing to the next column. I am completely flexible as far as markup goes...i.e. if something about UL/LI is getting in the way I can do nested divs etc. ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
