Bert, I take a pragmatic approach to tables and columnar design: use a single table with a single row and as many cells as I need (although invariably a max of 3). Gets rid of all sorts of cross browser problems. I have had a couple of Gecko purists efforting a table-less design for me just to prove it can be done. What's the point? They've both since agreed it's far simpler, involves far less fudging and is far more efficient to use the single table approach -- especially as I use alternate skinning incorporating vertical borders: www.seowebsitepromotion.com. This layout uses two elastic and one fixed width column. Why fixed for column 3? Because I need to accommodate as much text as possible in the first two columns and use the right column to display fixed size images, and I need to maintain an aesthetically satisfactory display at 640, 800 and 1024+ screen resolutions.
CSS isn't up to natural multi-columnar structures without a lot of faffing around. Once CSS evolves to adopt columns and browsers incorporate the changes I'll happily use them. Until then it's a matter of commonsense. I don't need to prove a point, I just make sites standards-compliant and accessible in as great a range or browsers (including Lynx) as possible. Mike Pepper Accessible Web Developer www.seowebsitepromotion.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bert Doorn Sent: 09 May 2004 16:23 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WSG] Forms, labels & headers Hi, > are you asking why using tables for layout is stupid? :-) > http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/ I know using multiple tables, nested "n" levels deep is stupid and results in lots of excess code. So is using font tags etc. That's why I don't design that way. But sometimes it is (to me) unavoidable to use a table, because the alternatives just don't work consistently enough across browsers. Thanks for the link. http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/14transitional.html sums it up for me, while the pages following it don't apply to sites I design. I've seen plenty like that, including a site that has a home page with 40k of HTML that includes 40 tables, some of which only hold ONE word (4 characters of content hidden in a total of 262 bytes of tag soup) Regards -- Bert Doorn, Better Web Design www.betterwebdesign.com.au Fast-loading, user-friendly websites ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ***************************************************** ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
