Re: vague thought - grid tag

sb@stephenbrooks.org wrote:

>In theory.  It would be nice if CSS did that, but HTML's logic in
>table-handling is very flexible and allows the sort of layout that would
>only be possible by a rather inelegant amount of CSS.  Grid layouts _do_
>have the structure of a grid, so to give all the cells an id= attribute and
>position them each absolutely seems like replacing something that is
>structured by something that is cludged.
>  
>
  Grid layouts are presentational, and there can be no valid argument 
against that.  Documents should be authored in a way that they can be 
viewed in a linear order, with no stylesheet applied (except for the UA 
default style), and have the full stucture and semantic meaning understood.

  Table layouts, or grid layouts, are completely redundant and actually, 
presentationally, very restrictive.  Take a look at the CSS Zen Garden 
[1] and tell me if you think that all those fantastic styles could be 
applied easily if the document were produced using a table layout.  I 
seriously doubt it.  View the document without stylesheets applied and 
you'll see the actual structure is seperated completely from the visual 
layout.

  Then, if your interested, take a look at CSS Edge [2] which has been 
designed to use CSS regardless of UA support.  As a result, both IE 6 
and Opera 6 can't view the pages in full CSS glory, but can still see 
the structure.  However, using Netscape, Mozilla, or any other standards 
compliant web browser, it looks fantastic.  This was also done without 
table layouts.

  If these two documents don't inspire you to think differently about 
page structure and layout, I'll be very surprised.

CYA
...Lachy

[1] http://www.csszengarden.com/
[2] http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/

Received on Thursday, 4 December 2003 21:59:41 UTC