A while back, Douglas Bowman wrote an awesome pair of articles for A List Apart called “Sliding Doors of CSS”. The articles described a CSS technique for making a tabbed interface where the tabs scale gracefully as the user changes his or her font size.

Bowman’s sliding doors provided elasticity based on the size of a container’s content. But it’s also desirable to achieve elasticity based on a container’s external constraints. This paradigm is particularly applicable to data sets, where we want one column to expand or contract dynamically to fill the available space.

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