On 07/09/2005, at 1:50 PM, Peter Asquith wrote:
Al Sparber wrote:
I'm not evangelizing table-based layouts, although for real-world
clients they sometimes are the right choice.
Presumably, in this case, the right choice is the choice that
limits the up-front cost and training required to get to market?
Surely promoting a questionable technique because it's easier to
learn and gives almost instant gratification is a dubious one?
No, but if, for example, you are creating a site to run on a
corporate intranet and you know for a fact that many or even some of
the company's employees are stuck on Netscape 4 with no hope of
upgrade (usually due to company policy or some such silliness), then
should you still create a lovely, semantically-correct CSS-P layout
that none of these people will ever get to see? Or should you create
a simple, clean table that at least puts the content into the desired
columns so that they don't just get everything in one long list down
the page?
It's one thing to discount such outdated browsers when designing for
the internet, because they are now such a small percentage and those
users are so used to having a crappy browsing experience nowadays
that they'll be happy as long as they can get your content (usually).
But intranets are a different story, and when there's a sizable
percentage of your target audience stuck with a browser that doesn't
do CSS very well, you really ought to at least _try_ to give them a
decent browsing experience.
Standards / semantic code / CSS-P layouts / whatever else you want to
call them are just a tool. Tables for layout are another tool. The
mark of a good craftsman is understanding all the tools at their
disposal, how to use them properly, and how to select the best one
for the job.
Just my 2c on this.
Cheers,
Seona.
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
