Micah Harwell wrote:
>
> On issues like this, I often look at the markup of the W3C
> (http://www.w3.org/ ). The W3C homepage _does use tables_ for layout.
I wouldn't rely on the W3C as particularly good practitioners of HTML,
actually. (Just look at their atrocious use of the TABLE SUMMARY
attribute on their front page.) IIRC, they only use tables on their
front page because when they tried to use CSS instead, the only browser
which rendered the page in anywhere near a decent fashion was Opera.
(This was before Mozilla became usable.)
>...
> > 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.
>
> The layout of the pages would not change on a day-to-day or even
> month-to-month basis, if designed correctly in the first place.
>...
Not necessarily. For example, in my mockup
<http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla.org/mozilla-org.jpg> there are
two sections on each page: the main content, and the subsidiary
navigation and search.
When presented visually, it makes sense to always show the subsidiary
navigation on the right (to be next to where the scrollbar appears for
most users), and the main content on the left. But when presented
aurally, or by a visual browser which does not support CSS, the ideal
ordering will depend on the page. On some pages (e.g. the front page) it
will be navigation first, content (news items) second. On other pages
(e.g. a leaf page of the XUL reference, where the subsidiary navigation
was actually links to other pages in the same section), it would be
better to have content first, navigation second.
With CSS, this just means swapping the order of the floated DIVs
(controlled by a boolean field in the Web site database); the visual
display is not affected. But with tables, you couldn't do this at all.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
