On 30 Jan, 08:25, "www.gerardvignes.com" <gerardvig...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Quote:
Is it appropriate to use HTML Tables to format content that is not
strictly tabular data
Of course not, but the definition of "tabular" is subtle. It's
certainly more than just "telephone directories"
If you insist on a "grid layout", then <tableis appropriate. A
"grid" here means a rectilinear arrangement of cells and columns _and_
where the height of adjacent columns depends on its neighbours. This
is the characteristic that can't be emulated by CSS otherwise, except
by JavaScript tricks that are less favoured than <table>.
The site you describe is visually quite well done, although it could
still use some fixes (on my browser the unset background colour ends
up as turquoise). It works well with pre-CSS <tablemarkup because
it's heavily dependent on images, and images are inherently pixel-
sized. The big practical problem with pre-CSS <tablemarkup
(assuming competent work) is that their sizing is pixel-based and
doesn't re-fflow well if the ratio between text size and windo size
varies.
This site doesn't need <tablemarkup. It's really three independent
columns, with vertical blocks in each column and a further pair of
columns splitting the centre column after the lead article. On the
whole I'd _rather_ do it with nested <div>s (three deep) because the
<tableisn't adding much (we don't need to vertically align the
columns) and the <tableeither still needs to be nested, or it's
requiring some awkward use of colspan for the lead article.
