[Webpro] tablelessness

[Richard Harb]

Monday, January 31, 2005, 6:44:10 PM, 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

To answer this question:
I guess for me it was peer pressure. As a freelancer I was not pressured by
clients or a boss but convinced by the articles I read on the subject.

Other posters in this thread have already mentionned that the code is a lot
cleaner. Since I write all of it in a plain text editor I really appreciate the
fact that it takes much less effort to produce it.


> 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!).  Needless to say, I learned a lot in my
> experimentations, and my personal website (www.j-ink.com
> <http://www.j-ink.com/> ) is still a remnant of those tableless days.
> But I eventually settled on doing table hybrids.  CSS has cut down
> drastically on the necessity for nested tables, only really necessary
> for forms and true tabular data presentation at this point, as well as
> total elimination of the blank.gif (which I always hated), font tags,
> and much more efficient use of BR tags.

> Evil, wicked, naughty font tags.

I agree to all the points you made here ...

... and want to add another one:
css makes the content cleaner for any future use, because of the presentation /
content seperation but it takes a lot more time to adjust the layout so it's
presentable in the various browsers including all the legacy ones that do not
(properly) support it.
But in the end I think the workload of creating pages has shifted to the right
place.

Richard