David,
I'm not sure about DOM issues but in my opinion, use of tables is
consistent with accessibility and semantic requirements if an external
style sheet is used to style the tabular data. Usually, some use of divs
is required if you want to present the tabular data in a particular way.
Tabular data should be marked up as actual tables. Anything else is a
perversion of standards. Screenreaders, to take the technical extreme of the
spectrum, have special controls and functionalities for users to navigate
tables (moving between rows/columns directly, getting info on associated
On 12/4/11 11:22 PM, David McKinnon wrote:
OK, so I'm working on a project in which the developers are laying out tabular
data using divs.
They say this is good because:
1. It's fast
Compared to what?
2. They can manipulate the resulting DOM much more easily than they could with
a
I remember seeing this for the first time. I was asked by a backend engineer
to help them fix a layout issue in a data table. When I looked at the source
code, the page was a jumble of absolutely positioned cells to look like a
data table. I shook my head and said he was on his own. I wasn't about
Thanks for the sanity check everyone :)
I was worried that I'd missed something.
I'd seen the YUI table module, thanks Ted, and I know of at least two jQuery
plugins that do the same thing so yeah, I'm not sure why they wouldn't use one
of those.
They're saying it's faster to use divs compared
OK, so I'm working on a project in which the developers are laying out tabular
data using divs.
The site is using the 960 CSS grid system so making the 'tables' work just
means applying the appropriate class to align each div/table cell to the grid.
They say this is good because:
It's fast
They
