On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 05:06 -0400, O. Lavell wrote: > Jim Lucas wrote: > > > Since this has been a topic of dicussion, I figured I would add my > > thoughts. > > > > I have been toying with the idea of doing a <table>-less layouts > > involving tabular data, calendars, etc... > > Why? > > > Recent threads have finally made me do it. Let me know what you think. > > > > http://www.cmsws.com/examples/templates/div_tables.php > > http://www.cmsws.com/examples/templates/div_tables.phps (source for > > above) http://www.cmsws.com/examples/templates/div_cal.php > > Looks clever, but unfortunately it solves a problem which does not exist. > In other words, and with all due respect: useless. > > > When you turn off the styles, the calendar becomes pretty rough on the > > eyes, but still "accessible". > > > > Same thing with the tabular data structure. > > > > But, not knowing how the various types of accessibility applications > > work, I am guessing that the layout to an application trying to read it > > should work fairly well. Let me know if I am way off the mark with my > > thoughts. > > Yes. <table> tags are intended to represent tables. It's as if the > authors of HTML foresaw a need... ;) > > Browsers render them quite well. They are valid in all versions of HTML > including HTML 5. Why not use them? > > The "evil" of tables is in abusing them for layout purposes. Where entire > pages are inside tables. Where you find tables inside table cells of > other tables (I've seen them nested 6, 7 levels, no kidding). It goes > against fluidity, accessability, maintainability, and everything that's > sane and right. > > "Tableless design" means you abstain from such table abuse, that you do > not use tables for enforcing layouts. Not that you get rid of tables > altogether. Ya know... the people over at HTML standards design cold have saved the world a large number of headaches by just adding a new attribute to tables: <table type="layout"> Then everyone layout table out there would have been valid by the simple addition of this attribue, backward compatible with older browsers, understandable by future screen readers, and much less hassle in general. But, I guess they were lacking some insight there. Instead we got a CSS spec to support table layouts that depended on the asshats over at Microsoft adding support, required all browsers at the time be upgraded, and today is pretty much useless in a global perspective. I'm all for standards, we could have even overlapped this system with CSS support so that when the browser support ultimately came, the switch would be simple. But no, simplicity would have been far too easy for everyone to swallow. Cheers, Rob. Ps. sorry for disappearing from this thread, I had a funeral to attend and had no internet for a week... yes I'm still shaking from withdrawal ;) -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
