ibm.com — Most developers dread dealing with HTML tables and cells to build their Web sites. Discover some basic techniques for writing Web sites that you can later re-skin by using templates during the site's initial creation. Also, learn why you should use data-driven techniques for your own Web sites.
Apr 24, 2008 View in Crawl 4
smokersroomApr 25, 2008
A long time ago, Britain and France were at war. During one battle, the French captured an English Major. Taking the Major to their headquarters, the French general began to question him.The French general asked, "Why do you English officers all wear red coats? Don't you know the red material makes you easier targets for us to shoot at?"In his bland English way, the major informed the general that the reason English officers wear red coats is so that if they are shot, the blood won't show and the men they are leading won't panic.And that is why from that day to now all French Army officers wear brown pants.
matt2kApr 25, 2008
Well, if everyone says it is bad, and the alternative is "clean" who can argue with that conclusive evidence like that? "It's only good for tabular data!", or any other time you have a multi-column layout, or complex grid requirements. Did you notice the IBM site that hosts this article was laid out with a table? Bet you didn't even notice the disturbing lack of accessibility and strictness!Using CSSP to layout your site is fine, and in may places it makes sense, but to take it as an almost religious (and parroted) maxim is just absurd. A programmer is going to use a template to plug in pieces of their site anyway, and there is little advantage to retooling a multi-thousand line CSS file versus copy & pasting a block to another location and saving template2.php
magic6435Apr 25, 2008
why the hell would i use tables to display the date?
smokersroomApr 25, 2008
Agreed.
petemorleyApr 25, 2008
He means data. Tables should be used to display tabular data, not to layout a website.
yodajonesApr 25, 2008
Let me guess who's in here.... Ummmm .NET coders?
kranklinApr 26, 2008
sigh. Say what you want, but when this whole use CSS only for layout BS came out, I gave it a shot and it caused me more headaches than ever. Even when you do use a "CSS only layout", you usually have to wrap you HTML tags and place them a certain way, which I don't think is semantic anyway. I think ultimately the best way to manage a large website which may need a template change from time to time is to use a good CMS such as Drupal or Joomla.
nexenatorApr 27, 2008
You should check out <a class="user" href="http://istylr.com">http://istylr.com</a> as it lets you "click-edit" table-less css designs onlive. It takes out a lot of hassle while dealing with "div's" and css and it even comes with built-in page-background and gradient creators.
igmuskaApr 29, 2008
What the deuce? IBM in the coding game...the article is just a rehash of all the same lame CSS Floating Div tuts out there right now. Since IBM wrote it, that must mean it's a good coding practice: that couldn't be farther from the truth. You can float just about anything but they never discuss that aspect, instead they sing "div this, div that, here a div, there a div, everywhere a div div, all night long div a div we go." hahahahahahaPHP can easily do most of the layout code. JOOMLA!, Drupal and WP are PHP frameworks that could easily be taught to those that need a fast website and if in the right hands can be extended to include personalized layouts...but no, will they do that? Nope it is all about the cash, taking simplicity and making it overly complicated to keep the code to themselves, selling it to those willing to pay cash to some geek lost in his own megalomaniac fantasy of power...toast!IBM is lame for even publishing this article, they should have at least used their own examples or at least discussed progressive enhancement or at least presented the best CSS layout practices, rather than using Zen Garden to make it look like they know something about CSS
mazursashaFeb 8, 2010
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Closed AccountFeb 12, 2010
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