Re: Columns and other layouts

I'm not quite naive enough to think that!

This conversation is not just about tables, it's about layout. Tables 
do some things very right but the thing that worries me about leaving 
it at "CSS has tables" is that you're saying that, as long as we have a 
better syntax for an old hack, all our layout issues are gone. They're 
not.

Because tables are simple and understood, they should stay, but one of 
the key reasons for CSS-P is that when layouts become complicated, like 
in the ways that Coises mentioned, tables get really nasty.

Now we have a situation where the same is true for positioning, 
floating and other CSS tactics. Logically simple layouts require lots 
of rules and markup. This isn't good, if you've got a simple concept, 
you can express it more accurately using simple language. I'm not going 
to suggest new syntax, because it would almost certainly be wrong, but 
I continue to assert that we need more expressive controls.

Ben


On Monday, Apr 28, 2003, at 02:13 Europe/London, Ian Hickson wrote:

>
> On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Ben Godfrey wrote:
>>
>> [...] It is defining relationships between content areas that tables 
>> do
>> much better than CSS and it's only those relationships that designers
>> care about really.
>
> CSS _has_ tables. Look at this document in Mozilla (or another browser
> with a good depth of standards support):
>
>    http://www.damowmow.com/playground/demos/layout/demo.html
>
> IE doesn't support this, but there's no reason to think that Microsoft
> will implement other requests before CSS2 tables.
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    
> fL
> "meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ 
> ,.
> http://index.hixie.ch/                         
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
>

(q)	Ben Godfrey?
(a)	Web Developer and Designer
	See http://aftnn.org/ for details

Received on Sunday, 27 April 2003 21:31:37 UTC