Paul, I know what you mean. Your head says in the long run it would be better if you persevered and really learned to master this stuff, yet there is still a client, deadline, business to run, and a life to live.
Why not just relax a little and do a table for the part that's giving you all the heartburn, and move on the rest of the site as compliant. The html wont validate, but will that really matter that much? You can always go back later on and remove the table if/when you get it nailed. The good aspects of standards compliant are still worth aiming at, even if you can't get all the way there with this site. I'm conscious of the words of Macromedia's Sean Cornfield at the CFUG meeting. He has 40,000 pages on the Macromedia site to look after and they haven't got a hope of getting compliant any time soon, but they're still working towards it bit by bit. Frankly I reckon you've got a pretty good site going there, and your only layout problem would be those three buttons that insist on wrapping. In that case I'd do a 3 cell table and plunk that in there to tame those graphics and move on to launch the site. When you attempt to validate the site it will throw errors, but as long as the errors are related to those three graphics, you just ignore them. That way you're still getting most of the advantages of a compliant site, without being truly compliant. I've taken this approach with a site I have where the WYSIWYG editor I use wont produce XHTML valid code - it will always change tags to upper case and changes <br /> to <BR> So since the pages are generated dynamically they can never validate. So I've just taken a snapshot of a few of the pages, saved them as html pages, manually changed the upper case tags etc, then checked that for validity. I know that the rest of the page validates ok so I'm just going to go with that. One day the WYSISYG editor (SPAW-CF by the way) will produce XHTML compliant code and then I'll have a fully compliant site. Compliance offers great benefits for all of us - users, site owners, developers, designers, but its not worth getting ulcers over or missing deadlines for. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -----Original Message----- From: Paul Ross [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 5 March 2004 4:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] turning back to the dark side... Hello Peter, Yes, I remember your post a while back and was going through a similar pain at the same time. Now it's getting serious as I have a tight deadline and IE is stubbornly throwing down as many roadblocks as it can manage and testing my sanity. If it wasn't for this list and other helpful forums I would be going back to HTML tables and not thinking twice about it. When IE gets its shit together and joins us in the 21st century I may lose my scepticism. :/ Regards PAUL ROSS SkyRocket Design Co http://www.skyrocket.com.au ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
