Re: Stylings only possible with Tables

James Elmore <James.Elmore@cox.net> wrote:

>Sorry that I wasn't very clear. I find a trade-off exists between clear and 
>wordy. Sorry, this time I seem to be wordy.

Sorry, none of what you has made it any clearer to me what problem you
are trying to solve, nor how you want to solve it. Note that I may have
skipped some of your earlier messages in the thread. I seem to recall
seeing messages displaying a screen full of quotes due to the previous
message being quoted verbatim, on such occasions I typically hit "next"
straight away.

>2. Layout features already exist (in tables) and could be used by designers to 
>improve their web pages, provided that they didn't require all the complexities 
>of tables to use.

Most users consider tables relatively easy to use for creating a layout
grid. The complexity lies in the implementation, but that work has been
done for existing clients.

>My list of these features includes: captions, 

Captions are not a layout feature, they signify a relationship with
other content. IIRC the HTML 5 proposals contain solutions for this.

>margin-collapse 
>controls, 

I don't know which specific problems you are referring to. IMO the
collapsing margin rules in CSS2.x are horribly complex and difficult to
implement correctly, consequently quite a few implementation bugs have
resulted from this.

Occasionally absurd behaviour can result from spec compliant collapsing
margin behaviour that can cause great confusion amongst authors.
Specifically; as specified the top margins of 2 elements are supposed to
collapse when they are adjacent, this is absurd imo. Only bottom-top
margins should be able to collapse. But adjacent top margins collapsing
is how it has been specified and now implemented.

>border-overlap controls, size controls for groups of blocks, and a 
>simple grid-like layout.

You have that with tables. I don't hear many others complaining about
how difficult tables are to use for layout, quite the contrary.

Regardless of whether or not a new CSS method allows implementation
algorithms to be reused, any new CSS mechanism would at best take a year
to specify, about five years to be implemented and it will take at least
another five years before the use of legacy browsers has diminished
enough before such a mechanism can realistically be used by authors.

And I'm still no clearer on what benefit you expect from such. 

-- 
Spartanicus

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 00:51:54 UTC