[Webpro] tablelessness

[Mike S. Krischker]

At 11:44 31.01.2005 -0600, you wrote:
> >> For me it's still a hack like tables were, although I'm not coding 
> layouts with tables anymore.
>
>
>
>Mike (and whoever else wants to participate here),
>
>       What made you decide to go completely tableless?  I had 
> experimented with tableless design for a while a few years ago and 
> honestly, it was pretty unsatisfying in the end.  It was difficult to 
> achieve the effects I wanted layout-wise, and consistency was a big 
> problem (browsers! bah!).

Hi Jason

Great subject.

It's the cleaner code that satisfies me, and that I don't use tables
for things they aren't meant to (layout). But as you write in your
article, there's almost no other way to lay out forms. And what I very
dislike is that you almost can't avoid to use hacks to make table-less
designs cross-browser compatible. And we're not talking about IE only.

I think what makes it difficult is the fact that CSS is not really
meant for visual design, it was thought merely for giving documents a
structure, i. e. emphasizing things, floating pictures in a text etc.
Floating for instance is genious if you use it like that, but as soon
as you need pages layed out in columns, it gets hacky.

For visual design, the grid is much more appropriate as a means to lay
out a page and relate elements to each other. And for creating this
virtual grid, tables were simply more suitable. So what I'm actually
missing is a <grid> tag:

<grid cols="3" rows="7">...</grid>

But as I think more about it, it's coming very close to the table tag  :P

Mike