From: "John Allsopp" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm not evangelizing table-based layouts, although for real-world
clients they sometimes are the right choice.
I have yet to be convinced that clearly breaking the spirit and
letter of a number of web standards, and all the attendant other
costs associated with Table based designs is justified by anything
other than a designers penchant for that technique.
I'm not saying that table layout should be the first choice - only
that it's sometimes the better choice. Given my read of the industry,
anything else (from either side) is extremism or opportunism.
What I am saying is that tables and valid code are not mututally
exclusive. I learned a long time ago that the best way to advance an
argument is to focus on the positive points of one's own view, rather
than the negatives of your opponent's :-) It's easy to lead people to
believe that table layout means nested tables, spacers, pervasive
deprecated attributes, and on and on and on - while table-less
layout is always squeaky clean and perfectly efficient. That's simply
not true. The CSS inspirational sites are full of nested DIVs, SPANs,
[enter name her] Image Replacement, Filter hacks, and my favorite-
using non-breaking spaces to create curved boxes. They are also full
of very elegant designs, some of which are efficient and well-coded,
while others are not. The same, and nothing less, can be said of table
layouts.
Yes, this is a standards mailing list. It's not a platform for scaring
people away from using a table when that is the only means to meet a
project goal.
The only example of purely efficient structural markup I've seen in
the past few years is this:
http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/articles/css/div_less/
Al Sparber
PVII
http://www.projectseven.com
"Designing with CSS is sometimes like barreling down a crumbling
mountain road at 90 miles per hour secure in the knowledge that
repairs are scheduled for next Tuesday".
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