Topic: Taking the Tableless layout too far

I could have posted this in at least 2 other forums, but due to the nature of the site it comes from I thought it may as well go in with the general chit chat.

As the Wed Developers here know, building sites with tables for layout, is bad practice, some people even go so far as to state that one shouldn't use tables at all on their sites... These people should be shot!

Observe a wtf

Beware, reading the comments may cause damage to your health and sanity...

Cheers,

this is definitely too far.
one of the comments got it right though:

quote:

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This is the PERFECT application for a table.

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The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

I recently worked on a project with a programmer who insisted on producing all the site's data like this. You could argue with him all day and he still insisted that tables were by their nature fraught with problems and not semantic. Everything was like this. I left the project.

They say you wouldn't use excell for a website layout, but it's perfect for laying out data. Please use common sense when writing data. Clearly this could use a table.

That is possibly the worst missunderstanding of the movement towards web standards that I've seen so far. No understanding of why tables are evil for layout, or when they are actually supposed to be used. Bad understanding of style sheets. Massive code duplication in style sheets. Decentralisation and bloat by use of style attributes. Pixel locked positioning that doesn't take font size scaling into account. Abuse of absolute positioning. Lack of units on CSS lengths. No quoting of class attributes. And NOBR elements. Bleh.

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abode: "http://liorean.web-graphics.com/",
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Since the semantic argument alone is often not enough to convince web designers, much has been made of the accessablity issues that tables are supposed to create, how they can increase file size, and so forth. Therefore, it is unsurprising that some have taken the tableless idea this far.

http://javascriptgames.50webs.com/

On that note, what ARE the main arguments for not using tables in layout? I have understood that it's a no-no, but I haven't actually heard any reasons for it. Any links on the subject, perhaps?

Basically it's all about Semantics; using the correct markup for its given purpose (Using the right tool for the right job).

Although as BuilderQ has stated, sometimes that's not enough to convinse people, regardless of if it's right or wrong.

Tables should be used when you are displaying tabular data, like a bank statement, or a table of results. But tables should not be used to describe layout, that's what divs and spans are for.

quote:

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ZupiCo said:
I have understood that it's a no-no, but I haven't actually heard any reasons for it. Any links on the subject, perhaps?

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As Blaise stated, it simply is not what they were meant to do, and they do not do the job well. They do it in a way that males certain things easier for people unwilling to learn proper technique, but at the cost of slower loading, less accesible, less flexible, less semantically correct mark-up.
The reality is that once you know what you are doing with HTML and CSS, designs become, in general, easier to implement, and much more open to variation than when tables are used.

http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/
is a pretty good run through of the issues.

The code screams generated. As pointed out by someone in that thread, it looks like it comes from a pdf. Makes sense.

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