Sent by Adam Kuehn on 8 December 2005 15:03
Rolf Mortenson wrote:
>Okay... so I recently posted this test page with a different problem,
>but I wonder if this would have benefited from display: table-cell or
>it's brethren?
>
>http://www.monkeypuzzle.net/testfiles/html_test_gc3/test5.html
Actually, this would have benefited most from an actual table.
The CSS display:table-cell is meant to mimic the display properties
of a table cell, but without actually having the table semantics at
the markup level. So why would you do that? Table cells in
traditional HTML have been granted some unique properties. They have
the ability to vertically center content with relative ease, for
example, something that can be difficult to accomplish using other
display types. And they have the ability to expand based on the
content of adjacent elements, something you would otherwise need a
direct container to accomplish. And, as someone already mentioned in
the thread, they have the ability to style arbitrary XML elements and
make them behave as tables.
But the key in using display: table-* is that you need table-like
display properties without wanting to have table-like semantics for
people/machines that don't get or use the styling information. In
other words, there are times when those properties can be very handy,
but it isn't that often. Most of the time, when you want to see a
table, you want to actually have a table in the structure, too.
And there is also the difficulty that while display: table-cell and
its siblings could be useful in certain places in the real world,
they actually aren't, simply because the vast majority of the
population uses a browser that doesn't support those values. Maybe soon.
-Adam Kuehn
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