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 headers, getting a count of rows/cells and where the current focus is) that are impossible to replicate with anything other than table markup. So, as much as I sympathise with the developers' "it's easier" take, it won't cut it I'm afraid.
P -- Patrick H. Lauke On 5 Dec 2011, at 07:22, David McKinnon <david...@mac.com> wrote: > 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 can manipulate the resulting DOM much more easily than they could with a > table > Developers find it easier to, say, add or remove columns from the tables, > without having to edit the code all the way down the table (no wysiwyg > editors here!) > To me this doesn't seem very good because: > It's not very semantic (although they've used micro data in the class names > for some divs) > It doesn't seem very accessible -- I might be wrong about this, but to me > good semantics is foundational to accessibility > There's a lot of markup -- I know tables aren't exactly light on code, but > they seem quite light and efficient in comparison > It doesn't seem to me like the code will be very easy to maintain for anyone > but the developers. > > The lead developers assure me that this is good practice for speed and > efficiency, but I'm not convinced. > Nevertheless, I don't want to be advocating tables as best practice if they > aren't. > > What do you think? Are tables too hard for the real world in large sites or > web apps where large amounts of DOM manipulation is required? Or have these > guys taken the 'Tables are bad' thing a bit too far? > > Kind regards, > David > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org > ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
