OK the following hot topic has arrisen:
To Table Or Not To Table.
This has opinions on either side. The main points:
1) "We drive for full standards-compliance, so we should code to that
intention." --support for no _HTML_ tables, but to use CSS2 tables.
2) "Tables are the only real way of laying out in a grid-like manner, at
least at this time." -- support for tables (only elements, no attributes).
3) There should be no real difference in non-table browsers whether we
do use them of not, it'll be the ordering of the data that's important.
4) If we insist on not using tables, and instead opt for <divs> and
plenty of CSS, are the individual page authors going to refuse and go
head with tables anyway?
5) Is Mozilla 1.0 even going to be capable of doing CSS-2 tables to the
extent we would need? Would our homepage display our bugs?
6) With tables, altering layout (particularly ordering) of parts of the
page will be time-consuming, as it could mean going through the html and
re-ordering where <tr><td>s appear and suchlike.
7) We could use XSLT on the client-side to re-order things, but mozilla
1.0 doesn't support that. Perl on the server-side has been suggested by
Hixie to go between generated html content and what the browser actually
gets in the way of html, so that we may alter things as they are sent out.
Here's a page Hixie did without tables:
<http://www.mozilla.damowmow.com/>
and one I did last night with tables:
<http://jmkg.net/mozilla/index.strict.html>
I would say "let the flame-throwing begin" but I'd actually like to see
constructive comments here. We should not concentrate on ideals, since
we do not live in an ideal world where all web standards are supported
and the world is ready to upgrade to mozilla 1.0 when we give the
signal. Instead, I suggest we plan to use only the web standards
supported in Mozilla 1.0, that is HTML 4.01 Strict and most of CSS2
(obviously other things possible). Suggestions of XSLT not welcomed
since we aren't supporting it :-/. Suggestions of using Perl/other
mechanism on the backend welcomed providing some viability is present too.
While we are thrashing this one out, it would be quite useful to settle
on both filesystem layout and URI layout too. We must get *some* basics
agreed upon!
James Green
