What is Digg?Sponsored by HowLifeWorks
How Smart Guys Keep Their Faces Looking Young view!
howlifeworks.com - Why men have finally started to use certain anti-aging skin care products...
123 Comments
- firefox15, on 10/10/2007, -5/+31While I believe there ARE many reasons to go with HTML+CSS over tables, this article only has a few valid arguments. FTA:
"Learning semantics makes you appreciate organization and write your other documents (even emails) in more organized way"
What a joke. - resplence, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14You can undigg this.
- tikistyle, on 10/10/2007, -0/+13I dugg this to read it at work in the morning, hoping to use the info to write a recommendation sheet for my manager. I took a peek. Now I wish i could un-digg this. Terrible grammar, and blogspam to boot.
- greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10I've done vertically aligned parallel content in XHTML/CSS quite easily, and it works in every browser I've ever found (with only a slight pixel jog in IE5).
... And my designs can't be done with tables - at least not without heavily abusing images and cell formats - most of which I'd end up doing in CSS anyway. And I've hand-converted table designs to a semantic page that looked identical - while using 1/4th the code with a 80+% bandwidth savings over the original design.
Tables are for tables (of data). Divisions are for divisions (of content). CSS's visual elements are for layout. I really don't see how you can't agree on the language the rest of us have already agreed upon. - HigherLogic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9...waits for the endless flood of "WordPress sucks" comments.
- ethergy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9XHTML-CSS > HTML, true, but this article sucks
- JelleK, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9Error establishing a database connection
http://duggmirror.com/design/55_Reasons_to_Design_in_XHTML_CSS_2/ - Kwilco, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8But it gets cached, whereas html on dynamic pages does not.
- greevar, on 10/10/2007, -3/+11Tables are for tabular data and that's it. They should not be used for page layout.
- sp0rk, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7The way this guy ***** through the 55 reasons reminds me of my essay answers on tests in middle school.
- rootnik, on 10/10/2007, -4/+10WordPress sucks
- Syntaxis, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Feyenoord!!!
(Ok sorry, lame joke. I suppose only soccer fans, specifically those in western Europe, know what I'm talking about. Sigh.. lengthy explanations always ruin good jokes.. look at what it does to a bad one. Sorry for wasting your time.) - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -2/+71 reason to not -- XHTML zealots are annoying.
Anyone that takes the time to think of 55 reasons is having a tough time making himself believe it was all worth it. Man this is stale stuff. - greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5To quote the W3's specification document on HTML 4.01 (standardized as ISO/IEC 15445:2000). http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/tables.html
"Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media. Additionally, when used with graphics, these tables may force users to scroll horizontally to view a table designed on a system with a larger display. To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables." - spling, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I'm more interested in an article that's "x Reasons to REDESIGN in XHTML/CSS".
If my website looks and works fine on 99% of modern browsers at the moment, and is valid html, why should I need to change a thing? - jamble, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I've worked on a few large sites for holiday companies and e-commerce sites which have used a mix of divs for layout and tables for data with no problems.
I really don't understand why you lot are so opposed to xhtml/css and tableless design. It's not 2002 anymore. - thesimo, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5im not quite sure what to make of this list. but some were useful i guess?
- XBSHX, on 10/10/2007, -3/+755 Reasons to not use wordpress... wait theres only 1.
- tybris, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Actually, that's not HTML. It's just something that resembles HTML which most browsers will render fairly quickly (possibly because they skip parts of the process due to all the errors).
- piwy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4PSV!!
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3#1 - nobody is forcing anyone to move to XHTML2. In fact many sites will go from 1.x to 5 when the time comes.
#3 - Your precious HTML is well older.
#4 - It encourages proper use of markup and semantics.
#5 - Divs are used as panels, not as table cells. Those who do otherwise missed the point.
#6 - it's easier to validate - RSS feeds are irrelevant.
#8 - Flash is older than XHTML. Check your facts before sprouting fiction.
#9 - is hardly accurate most of the time.
#10 - care to back that up with proof?
#11 - speak for yourself, young zealot. - Frankie4Fingers, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Well CSS/DIVSPAM is not exactly going to work for many designs. There is still no good way to lay out very large form pages for transactional web-based applications with just DIVs without having tons of nested DIVs. There is also no good way to make a style sheet that will work for applications with 200+pages with large amounts of form field and other layout combinations, such as 1 column, 2 columns, 3 columns, 1 column with 2 column below, 1 column with list of data below and so on and so forth. If you have many pages all using some form of these layouts and you want developers to stick to some standard layouts but you need them to be able to put form fields of varying lengths in them, good luck creating a good CSS template that will work with all pages.
- toxicityj, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3reason YOU'RE wrong:
4. you can code XHTML/CSS to the letter as far as W3C compliance goes and it still probably won't look the exact same in all browsers. especially IE6. - Nanobe, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I really wish people would stop equating XHTML with separation of content and presentation and other good web authoring practices. Under typical server configurations, your XHTML is actually being sent to the browser with the "Content-type: text/html" HTTP header which causes all major browsers, including IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, to treat the page exactly like regular HTML. They use HTML parsers, follow legacy HTML conventions in the CSS and JavaScript rules, and so on. The doctype makes no real difference in this regard. So it isn't XHTML that's giving you these benefits, it's just general good practice rules that can be used equally well with HTML.
Meanwhile, the very fact that browsers are treating your XHTML as HTML causes some complications. Notice that if you put some horribly malformed content in your XHTML, no browsers complain. A browser treating XHTML correctly (using an XML parser) *would* complain, in a major way: the user would get a parse error message instead of the page. Even if you have valid and well-formed XHTML, there are still big differences between the end result of parsing through an HTML parser and an XML parser, and most of these go unnoticed because authors are only learning at how HTML parsers are handling their XHTML.
Here's an article I wrote that goes into more detail with see-for-yourself examples: http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware-of-xhtml - resplence, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Yeah.. and I guess next article from them is "55 reasons to breathe"
- HigherLogic, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4He mentions this in the description: "By tableless I mean avoiding tables (or a tagsoup of unnecessary divs substituting table trs and tds) for layout purposes." Reading is fun.
- neoform, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3They rendered on the fly with both IE and FF, that accounts for 98% of the browsers out there.
handling everything in css means separate css files, meaning your layout better not change from page to page, which is great for wordpress and ***** for just about everything else. if you're content/layout does change a lot, you have to use inline css, which ends up being a lot worse than if you were using tables. far harder to read and a lot more code. - deadlift, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Wordpress sucks
- rageguy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4WordPress sucks
- jenshik, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4WordPress sucks
- rootnik, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4"Go ahead and find me a site like that doesn't use Tables and CSS together instead of just DIVs and CSS."
You are on one right now.
Sorry, I am on your side of the debate. I've yet to find a table tag on digg... - Tippis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Which validator are you using?!
The W3C one happily berates me if I send it a text/html header together with xhtml content... - Tippis, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4You mean a large, varied, multi-layout project like, say, http://www.apple.com/ ?
Let's play "find the table" on that site... - Frankie4Fingers, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2No one said use tables "purely as a means to layout document content". The WCAG and W3C are talking in generalities. These work for most sites that are simple and are built for the entire world population. When building thin-client transactional applications, it works a little differently. Most of the time, the audience is controlled, the browser is set and the screen resolution is set. They want powerful screens that are developed with code that is readable and maintainable. Go ahead and find me a site like that doesn't use Tables and CSS together instead of just DIVs and CSS.
- zeptobyte, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2The primary idea of this article is: Because it's the "in" thing. -_- How lame.
- Bricks, on 10/10/2007, -4/+6FTA
Google knows this:
* 2,130,000 xhtml sucks < 10,300,000 html sucks
Right.. because just as many people use XHTML and know to complain about it - infocyde, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2No way man, tables just get things done sometimes and they are cross browser compatible. I don't necessarily want write 10 divs just to get something to line up right, especially when I'm try to do a cross browser vertical align or something like that on a page. People who get adamant about the non use of tables I just don't get. I'm not anti CSS or anti XHTML, I'm just anti non-critical thinking. Come on people, does it really matter? Does the end user care?
- Syntaxis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Flash websites are often badly integrated - it is usually impossible to bookmark a certain page, or even send a link to someone without having to explain where to click on. Furthermore, SEO is most often impossible to "get right" without offering an HTML version of the website, and compatibility might be an issue on computers in companies where the system administrator doesn't allow workstations to install plugins into their browsers. Let alone Linux' issues with Flash, or 64-bit operating systems.
- jackcall, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2OB ftw!!!
- Tippis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Thoroughly incorrect. Search engines weighs the content of the tag depending on the semantics of the tag. Title text ranks higher than headers; headers rank higher than body text...
...or maybe you're talking about Alta Vista or some other epitome of the pre-XHTML/CSS web? - FuzzyCat, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2
I presume this person isn't a native English speaker... oh and 55 reasons? I don't think so - by about #1 (s)he ran into trouble. crap list. - zammit, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Reasons You're WRONG:
1. The w3c is not slow. if they made improvements as fast as mozilla releases firefox updates, no average user or company would be able to keep up. try updating your software on a daily basis for a "new" standard, while trying to make bug fixes... ain't gunna happen
2. XHTML has everything to do w/ semantics, the most obvious example (as said ^^ way up there) is table vs div...
3. good form leads to better functionality, if your markup makes sense, your site will be more flexible
4. if you code your xhtml/css properly, it will look exactly the same in Safari, Firefox, IE and Opera. I've got every1 of my sites looking exactly the same in IE5.01, IE5.5, IE6, IE7, Opera 8, 9, Firefox 1, 2, and the latest version of Safari for win & mac
5. because other people use XHTML wrong, doesn't mean its a reason not to use it... - foobr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2We do this kind of work on a regular basis, but we don't use nested div's or tables. Instead lookup up the dl element.
dt's for labels, dd for inputs. Works like a charm. - Nanobe, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Editing time ran out. That should be "authors are only testing how HTML parsers are handling their XHTML."
- extrabigmehdi, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11) I'm not a fan of XHTML. Although I understand the need for maintaining a clean code,
I find the XHTML standard, too restrictive.
2) I'm not a fan of tableless design. I try to use as much as possible CSS for the design, but I won't give up tables.
Sorry, but it's too easy to mess up layout of a template, when using layers only. - techmonkey4u, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I don't use floating divs most of the time because it's just too difficult to get everything working in all popular browsers with all the other DHTML stuff on my pages. Until the browsers get their collective asses in gear with the standards, I'm going with tables most of the time because they work. I don't need any extra headaches (mostly due to IE). Ideally, I'd love to be using tableless layouts, but I've found it's just not too practical with the way browsers (read: IE) mess things up when my javascript changes some elements and I'm not into CSS hacks, separate stylesheets, and/or browser sniffing.
- aussieNickuss, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1"There is still no good way to lay out very large form pages"
Actually, fieldset and label tags when styled correctly are so much easier to use than tables to layout forms. Also, floats are simple to use with different columns etc, with less code than table cells (eg. if you want a three column layout for just a small portion, set three left floating divs to 33% wide, for two columns, set them to 50%). Using a small amount of inline CSS isn't that bad, just make sure the overall styles are defined in a stylesheet. - krinthekuz, on 09/16/2008, -3/+4don't worry smith. i'm with you. here on digg, virtually everyone is a self proclaimed web designer, and most have little or no coding experience.
1) when "the coder" (who these web designers claim works on every project in tandem with the designer, despite the fact that most projects are done solely by 1 person, or an entire team of people who understand that function > form) actually gets around to putting in "the code" to make the layout actually functional, he'll butcher the layout on a per page basis just as much if it's css as if it's tables. yes, multi-million dollar companies butcher the layout to put in function. that's why they do the layout last in virtually every software engineering model.
2) none of you css fanboys know what semantic means. http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+semantic no one intended for people to have to write browser specific code because the browsers treat tags differently, and no one intended for you jackasses to use ridiculously nested divs and spans.
3) all too often, you see some css fanboy making css blocks on a per FORM basis because they're so anti-tables. that makes absolutely no sense.
4) tables are easy to make. it's not our fault if you don't know what tr and td mean.
now digg me down because i just bashed the masses on digg. - Lorwik, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1http://www.hdrjapan.com all css and xhtml....this is the way of future web design
- neoform, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1and doing all this extra work gains you what? a few saved bytes?
why not learn C instead of C++ then because of a ram you'll save? talk about stupid thinking. -
Show 51 - 100 of 123 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is