Andreas,
I don't think "using tables is a very good way of raising the risk of
invalid documents" as John suggested, but rather people that use
tables have
got an old-fashioned mindset.
Whatever the reason, if you see a table based design, the chances of
it being invalid are raised monumentally.
And we are talking about companies and organizations with billion
dollar turnovers, multi billion dollar market caps.
I think in part you are right that it is mindset. But I'd also argue
that the simple use of tables increases the complexity of code, and
with it the chances of error. This is a lesson hard learned in
Software Engineering - complex languages and constructs, and
syntactic complexity raise the chances of error among all developers.
The last 30 years of development of programming languages and
software engineering approaches has been one of simplifying, and
managing complexity (you might argue that it hasn't worked all that
well, at least in the wild)
Moonshots famously missed the moon due to the complexity of fortran.
These were smart people, smarter than I ever was or will be.
We tend to learn these lessons in web development slowly, painfully
and fitfully if at all.
So not only is it *who* is using the technique, it is the technique
itself which is problematic.
john
John Allsopp
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support forum :: http://support.westciv.com
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Web Essentials web development conference http://we05.com
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