Comments on: Definition of a table-less layout

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:29:40 +0000

Ace: Court was obviously being tongue-in-cheek, no need to raise your eyebrows there :)

Thanks for the feedback.

By: Ace John

Ace John — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:44:41 +0000

@court : seriously, is it really five “billion” website?

Anyway, use divs for layout. use tables for
tabular data. use for list and so on…
meaning, use the appropriate HTML tags
for its intended purposes. dont cheat.

and also, firefox change the background color of name and mail fields to yellow. so i cant see my name/mail (cause the text is color gray).

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:40:27 +0000

I agree with #2.

It would be very silly to have data that is clearly supposed to be in a table (like members in Enthusiast) in divs/paragraphs/lists. You just can’t replace tables in some areas of design.

By: Angela

Angela — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 03:16:15 +0000

Hi Courtney! You’re right, the need to use standardized markup becomes more apparent when you’re working with a lot of websites that need to be as maintainable as possible. For one, they’re faster to code and style, and you don’t need to do anything MORE to have them behave the way you need them to, by virtue of the fact that they already behave that way by default.

It’s also “self-documenting”; you’d know just by looking at (uncommented) markup what is is, as opposed to using other elements which might not be as obvious.

I love your point about if someone turns off stylesheets! That’s ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that, for all that I’m drowning in graceful degradation at Y!, lol!

By: Court

Court — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:52:19 +0000

Working at a company where I have to keep five billion websites up to date, I personally find it so much easier to use tables for data that requires it, instead of using a bunch of lists and making it look like tabular data. Again, like you stated, it IS more semantically correct to put it into a table. Especially if someone turns off style sheets, then it’s still going to display properly, which is definitely what you want to aim for in semantically correct markup.

Plus, I find because I’m not the only person to keep websites up to date at times, but as I AM the only wedesigner, it makes it easier for these other people to update this table data on the websites without “breaking the layout” of the whole site.