Re: Stylings only possible with Tables

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 02:39 +0100, Spartanicus wrote:
> James Elmore <James.Elmore@cox.net> wrote:
...

> >What if users want normal 
> >blocks, with margins, padding, etc., but want them aligned in a grid? They must 
> >use tables.
> 
> Again only when footers are required, or for column layouts when their
> height must extend to the largest of the columns. And again, HTML tables
> used for layout are not the problem some claim they are.

The rationally I have read so far when I raised the question about
having a height of 100% in a child of a non-specific height parent was
about incremental rendering.  Now tables, specially in layout, breaks
(or can break the incremental rendering).  Tables are not going away any
time soon, so I ask again why not height: 100%.

The use of tables for layout can be the problem when you want to have
the same content on different medias.

So far all I have read about CSS was that it is the way to separate
layout from content.  Most sites and books on the subjects goes in the
same line.  This is also true about the TABLES are for TABULAR data, not
for layout stuff.

I did reread the [X]HTML 1/CSS 1/2/2.1 W3C pages to find this 2
arguments and couldnt find it.  So this mean I cant really expect to
prove that tables (in XHTML) for layout is wrong and that all layout
stuff should be in the CSS and not in the XHTML.  W3C never promissed
that.  (btw, in the previous post when I cited Zen Garden I didnt mean
to say they are doin right, just to illustrate the promisse of
content/layout separation)

This is fine for Desktop Navigation (which maybe implies 80% of web
usage (wild guess)).  But what about other medias like cell phone,
printing, pdas or even text/acessibility browsers.  They all suffer if
the content/layout separation doesn exist.

AFAIU, using table for layouts will hurt the changing media (selected
thru CSS).  am I wrong? can the this still be done with table for
layouts?

Still keeping content vs layout separation and tables (even for tabled
data) in mind.  What about XML?  For what I understand the real
difference between XHTML and XML for rendering is that in XHTML the
browser^H^H^H^HUser Agent already has its predefined way to render it
(e.g. H1 is a block with margin of xxx) and XML comes blank and it is
the job of the stylesheet to render it.

If the XML has some data that I would like tabulated as in a <table> in
XHTML, can it be accomplished with CSS?

If the answer to this is no, this shows that there is a need to do it in
the CSS.  (btw, If the answer to this is yes, please disregard my
message and any pointers would be appreciated).

I know that CSS (as of 2.1) is not for layout (yet).  Is this
table/layout/tabular data being addressed already? or just a known issue
that everyone just knows it will have to be addressed sometime?

If this is of any help to anyone, the way Gtk+ addresses tables is
fairly simple to maybe inspire from.


-Raul Dias

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2007 16:32:33 UTC