Sent by Eric A. Meyer on 19 September 2002 16:04
At 10:33 -0400 9/19/02, Jack_Speranza wrote:
>Seriously, though. I am neither a CSS nor web standards guru, but from
>lurking and poking around, I've been under the impression that tables are
>structurally intended for the display of data that is logically related
>through the columns and rows. I thought one of the main benefits behind CSS
>was to assure visual design was separate and distint from the logical
>structure of content?
The role of tables in Web design is, like points/pixels/ems for
font size, one of those topics that's a holy war waiting to happen.
There are several schools of thought, and you express one: tables
shouldn't be used for layout, but only for actual tabular data (e.g.,
financial reports). Another is that tables are just fine for design
work, because they're there and they work. A third is that one
should use tables to a very minimal degree, and style the content
appearance with CSS.
I'm not going to say which of these is better than the others,
because there isn't a One True Answer; in other words, none is better
than the other from a purely objective point of view, but each is
best for certain subjective points of view. I've used all three.
Until the beginning of 2002, meyerweb.com followed the minimal-tables
model, with a two-cell table to block out the page structure and lots
of CSS to make the cell contents pretty. Just before this list was
launched, coincidentally, I moved to a no-table design. In the past,
I've done tables-in-tables-in-tables design. Each time I picked the
strategy that worked best for the project at hand.
Ultimately, it is the author's choice to pick the strategy that
best fits his or her needs, and go with it. I personally find
nested-table design to be cumbersome, needlessly bloated, and too
inflexible to seriously consider, but these are very much personal
feelings. I make heavy use of CSS because it fits my authoring and
thinking style much better. That it's more "modern," and makes the
content more accessible, is honestly beside the point, although I
won't deny those are really nice benefits.
We really need to collect a few good articles that represent the
three thought-schools I mention above, plus any others I missed, and
get them into a css-discuss wiki page.
--
Eric A. Meyer (http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/), List Chaperone
"CSS is much too interesting and elegant to be not taken seriously."
-- Martina Kosloff (http://www.mako4css.com/)
