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http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16268 ant.apache.org uses tables for formatting. ------- Additional Comments From [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2003-01-20 18:30 ------- If your only criteria is do the bits eventually wind up in the right location on the screen then you are correct. However there are other criteria for a good web document. The logic you employ comes from a desk top publishing perspective, which is different from web publishing in several critical ways. 1. Desk top publishing (DTP) results in paper output, which can only be read in one manner. It can only be read by people, and can only be read with the eye. All support for the handicaped, is entirely separate from the document produced in desk top publishing. Nobody can actually look at a web document. (geeks who shave and read memory chips with microscopes aside... I've heard that can be done.) One can only read it with the aid of a computerized device. That device *might* be a standard web browser on a desk top platform, which is what you are assuming. However increasingly likely is the posibility that is palm base, or phone based browsing, which in some cases treat tables very differently from plain text. If the person is blind, it could be a text reader. If the person is stuck somewhere they can't fire up a GUI, it could be a text only browser like Lynx. Furthermore, unlike the paper produced by DTP, a web document may be read by a *machine*. Machines have no way of understanding that this table is for formatting and that table actually contains tabular data. If you dobut that, I challenge you to write an algorithm for distingishing the two types of table... 2. Structured markup (such as xhtml) properly used describes what a document is and what it contains. Formatting information is contained in the style sheet. It is even possible to have a style sheet that specifies formating for visual, print and aural media. This makes it possible for a (properly writen) browser to render the page appropriately regardless of context. Simplified structured markup is what HTML was originally supposed to be, but web designers were in short supplie and Graphics Artists trained for print media were in over supply, so much of the web design of the past decade was done by people who only ever considered where the pixel lands on the screen. Many of these people published books that sold well because there were a bunch of (formerly starving) Graphic Artists trying to learn how to get on the Web gravy train. Don't get me wrong, I don't fault them, every thing they did was logical and expediant from their perspective. The web wouldn't be what it is today without them, but the web can be more than it is, and we should be helping that process not hindering it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
