> From: Chris Blown [...] > One of the things that I find hard to believe in this whole debate is > that tables are some how seen as "a non standards based approach".
I see that view a lot from people who just discovered the beauty of CSS, and are going a bit mad in the fight to kill off tables, even when they're the appropriate markup to use (tabular data). > Of > course an argument could be made that tables only exist in > the standard > for legacy reasons, since dropping them would break the whole web. Well, for tabular data, there is *no* equivalent with the same semantic and structural properties of a well written, multi-row, multi-column table. Using divs and spans and stuff to recreate a table look without tables for tabular data shows a complete misunderstanding of what the actual purpose of the markup is all about. Yes, you may end up eliminating every single table, and get a nice glowing warm feeling...but you've effectively broken any relationship which was defined between the various headings and the data cells, turning well formatted tabular information into a meaningless mess... > does the fact that we use them for other purposes make it wrong? Of course not. However, by the same reasoning, it doesn't make it right to pervert the element's original purpose, the same way that blockquote should not be perverted to get visual indentations, for instance...it doesn't make the actual blockquote element wrong, but it shouldn't be used in that way. It's the perversion of purpose that is wrong. > The popular response to Andy's article that using the odd > table without > nesting them, is simple practical advice. I don't really think the odd > table is that detrimental to our efforts of advocating web standards. Exactly. As long as the designers/developers are making the decision in full knowledge that there might be a better way to handle the situation without having to resort to tables, but that - due to time constraints, need for legacy browser support (in a visual/layout sense), work with multiple authors who may not be up to speed with table-less layout - in this particular situation using a table will do for now. Just going through this email, I hope I'm not giving the impression that I'm in disagreement with you...I see that we're both coming from the same pragmatic approach. Just filling in the other side of the argument kind of thing... Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
