Kenny Graham said: > In most of the previous table layout vs css layout arguments I've seen on > here, people refer to "divs vs tables". Now, I never learned table based > layouts, and don't understand them (spacer gifs, etc). Because of this, I > don't/can't think along the lines of "I'm replacing tables with divs". But > many of the XHTML/CSS sites I see clearly do. For instance, they'll put a > <ul> inside a <div id="menu">, just so that they can style the <ul>, > instead > of just giving the <ul> itself an id. Or put the contents of a paragraph > inside a <span id="p1"> instead of giving the paragraph itself an id of > p1. > The only time divs don't make me cringe is when they're used to enclose a > group of elements with the header that applies to them, and this purpose > of > divs is being replaced with <section>. I know that divs are more > semantically neutral than tables, but is wrapping an element in 5 divs and > a > span really that much better than wrapping it in a table? Hopefully this > will start a debate that I can learn something from, since I have a > limited > background in tables. >
overusing elements in the manner you describe is not the best approach, and is often a result of poor generators, or lack of decent descendant selector support, or (as you imply) simply using divs and spans as surrogates for table elements. As stated on the other current css v. table thread, using tables exclusivly for tabular data makes it easier to scrape the page at a later date for data. what are you hoping to learn about? kind regards Terrence Wood. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
