:: Personal website of a Toronto web designer
Lately » It's all about what our content means
The Meaning of Semantics by Molly Holzschlag Nearly every web designer is guilty of forcing line breaks, creating tables that don't hold tabular data, and a host of other egregious HTML sins. Now that CSS is around, Molly E. Holzschlag slaps our hands and explains why we should pay attention to each element's content, not just its looks.
:: Sasha, at 07:23 pm on Wednesday, 02. March 2005
Thanks for linking at exit :)
:: zoka, at 09:46 am on Thursday, 03. March 2005
An invaluable lesson to learn. It's a pity IE hasn't yet implemented CSS tables and probably never will.
:: J. King, at 09:50 am on Thursday, 03. March 2005
"In today's CSS-oriented design, restricting the use of table and its related elements to properly describing tabular data is semantic. Any other use is presentational."
And presentational is evil, I guess.
Short, shameful confession: I just replaced my table-free layout that I had been running since 2001 with *gasp* a big old presentational table (one, not the nasty multiply-nested ones loaded with font tags). Because all the solutions for full-height columns completely suck, but every browser in existence can cope with the table. So mea maxima culpa. It's actually radically less markup than doing the various CSS hacks for equal-height columns and *it works*. I gave each of my six table cells a meaningful ID, and I use CSS to style the contents.
Saying "you can never use a table presentationally" reminds me of saying "never write in the passive voice." Yeah, you should prefer the active voice, but there are times when you need the passive, and there are times when a table is the correct tool (even if it's *gasp* presentational).
:: linear, at 12:24 pm on Monday, 14. March 2005
Useless scrawling facts:
Top 5 scrawlers:
(updated once a day)
556 Sasha
488 zoka
316 vitez-koja
235 Davor
58 mungos
