Template Confusion

Quote from: kickass at Mar 18, 2006, 09:28 PM

To be a bit more semantically specific tables are banned for everything but tabular data.

Yeah exactly, we’re on the same page here

Quote from: kickass

And thank you so much for the steer toward the Unclassified News Board, I’m sure I’ll get use out of it. (okay, who wants to do an integration???)

You’re welcome

I like to share my favorite apps, while I am a big fan of PunBB, it’s not tableless... so I translated UNB to french...

About the integration : I’d love to see that happen !

I find it a bit restrictive to dogmatically state that tables are never to be used for layout. If I have a choice between a single simple, two-row, two-column table to define a specific layout or a more (politically/semantically) correct layout and a horribly convoluted CSS file that will break for browser X under condition Y, guess which one I’ll go with? As someone once wrote in an article on the subject, until more browsers support the box model and the float model according to the standards, it is not always practical to code to the standards. I really don’t see the advantage of "cleaning up" the HTML only to obfuscate the CSS. Balance is the key; I certainly agree that a mess of nested tables is most undesirable.

Greatly summed up Susan, as we say in french "follow the spirit, not the letter".

I agree tables are not evil, and it’s true sometimes cross browser compatibility can be downright unnerving, but the thing is I don’t know how to use complex table layout anymore... This being said, I have been known to use things like



to have min-height in IE... it breaks validation but it’s handy and simpler, thus I use it...

Quote from: davidm at Mar 19, 2006, 11:09 PM

Greatly summed up Susan, as we say in french "follow the spirit, not the letter".

I agree tables are not evil, and it’s true sometimes cross browser compatibility can be downright unnerving, but the thing is I don’t know how to use complex table layout anymore... This being said, I have been known to use things like

height:expression( X + "px");

to have min-height in IE... it breaks validation but it’s handy and simpler, thus I use it...

I never openly say tables are evil because once upon a time I used to code layouts using them.

I have an understanding why some folk choose to fall-back on tables for layouts because until I got really good at tableless, I used to do that too!

Now I can’t code layouts with tables because I’m so out of practice - and I honestly haven’t completely decided if that’s a good thing.

However - it is a better ’thing’ thank’s to modX. Teaching client’s content management of tableless layouts is now just a case of teaching them how to use modX. And that, is a lot easier than teaching table minded people how to use tableless css layouts

David, you can use that expression for min-height and get the page to validate. All you have to do is feed it in via an iestyle.css which is fed into your page by a conditional comment. In fact, all my IE kludges and hacks are getting fed in this way since we don’t know how IE7 will react to things. This future proofs pages. I actually blogged futureproofing for IE7 with Conditional Comments not all that long ago. Oh, and something important- make sure the space is between the IE and the number or the CC won’t work. Drove me batty for most of an afternoon the first time I used one (and it didn’t have to drive far!)

Quote from: kickass at Mar 20, 2006, 01:26 AM

David, you can use that expression for min-height and get the page to validate. All you have to do is feed it in via an iestyle.css which is fed into your page by a conditional comment. In fact, all my IE kludges and hacks are getting fed in this way since we don’t know how IE7 will react to things. This future proofs pages. I actually blogged futureproofing for IE7 with Conditional Comments not all that long ago. Oh, and something important- make sure the space is between the IE and the number or the CC won’t work. Drove me batty for most of an afternoon the first time I used one (and it didn’t have to drive far!)

Thanks for the IE7 feedback !
I am SO tired of M$ though... I wished people would hugely switch to standard compliant browsers... will happen one day (or else M$ will become compliant ?? One can dream...)

Yeah I know about and use conditionnal comments, I just meant the more I build websites, the more I try to avoid having a specific CSS for IE because it makes things painful on updates. I usually make a point about error free pages, but I also try to save time as much as I can, and some clients just don’t care about a little error here and there.

Yeah, I at different times (depending on how much grief it’s giving me) refer to it as the broken browser, the evil one, that piece of sh%& (insert your local curse word for manure here), and a few more colorful invectives when it’s really doing something off the wall.

IE7 is going to be a whole new adventure. And they’re getting it only partly right. From what I hear min max width height is still going to be a problem. I just reread that article on conditional comments and am glad to see a gt as well as a lt or lte definer, since there are going to be interesting times ahead.

You think working with two stylesheets is a pain? Wait’ll we have to work with three - the "good" one, the lte IE 6 one, and the gt IE6 one.