Question To All Webdesigners

Off-Topic
41

I call Bullshit :D

http://www.topxml.com/xhtml/articles/xhtml_tables/

42

I dunno.

First of all : The table-approach came from print media where it is still valid today. Every newspaper and magazine is based on a grid which is not very different from the table-based layout once used in webpages. They do not reinvent their layout for every page every day (or week), they have this grid to work with. It is true that it all got completely overhand with nested tables and stuff, but still : A table is basically a horizontal/vertical representation of data. Nothing wrong with that.

Secondly: What amazes me is that some “validators” scream “bloody murder !” if they see a

at all. As I wrote somewhere, if I have a list of pictures and their description that I want to put on my webpage, why can’t I put them in a table ? It’s the normal thing to do… Instead I am supposed to work on some crazy
-setup. Don’t see the reason.

And thirdly: I wrote this somewhere before, but I think the whole div-approach can get even worse than a table layout. You got your sourcecode which is a long list of data, but the data in that code has nothing to do with the way it looks at the end. I know about searchengines and stuff, but I don’t think it’s very good/comfortable to actually be able to put something at the end of the code and make it appear at the top of the page. Kinda illogical.

And about validating : The reason is simply that I can be sure I have no problems/errors in my sourcecode that one browser might digest easily and another might trip over.
I realized yesterday that one of my wordpress-blogs has a serious problem, at the end of most pages three

-tags are unclosed. It looks okay in firefox and all, but that is a good hint that there is something utterly wrong with the whole thing.
43

I’ve definitely learned more about CSS over the past year. I’ve made several themes to different forums, from scratch, and I’ve made several webpages now using a number of CSS techniques. It definitely has made things easier.

My current forum and main page (which is sort of a portal for my forum, a link is in my signature) have definitely utilized some CSS. I sure get irritated though with the fact that so many people still use IE6, which doesn’t really support png images very well. I don’t get why people are so stuck on IE–it’s a spyware haven, especially when people use it to view myspace pages…

anyway…

44

I’d like to add some good tutorials and ressources from maxdesign to the discussion that helped me lots when I switched from table based layouts to standard compliant HTML/CSS in my webwork:

Tutorials for CSS selectors, how to use floats for layout, and how to use lists for menus:
Selectutorial
Floatutorial
Listutorial

Menu list examples:
Basic lists
Nested lists

45

Generally DIV is preferred over TABLE tags. It stands for divider. It divides the data into small proportioned blocks which do not have to cover related subjects. Tables should cover a single subject. That’s about it in short. DIV’s are preferred as well because search engines seem to prefer them over TABLE’s increasing your rank in result lists. On top of that it is recommended to write your webpage from top to bottom as you generally would. You can put div’s located on the bottom of your browser in the top of your code. But matching the code order with the website itself is a plus as well, for overview or editing later on, but also for search engine optimizations.

Apart from all that DIV’s offer a lot of flexibility. Advanced positioning and layering. It’s harder to get it to work properly cross browser though. Just make sure the website looks similar in IE6, IE7 and FF and you got more than 90% of your visitors happy :)

Could be I’m off a bit here and there. I’m not so much a designer. I mainly build web-applications to manage websites instead of building the website itself.

46

Othree: Nah, I think you’re quite spot on. I work as a web developer and with content management systems and I sometimes check my work with IE6, IE7, Opera, FF2 and Safari, but in 90% of the cases, the errors are in IE6, so if you’ve got IE6/IE7/FF working, you’re quite safe.