tables for layout bugs question

[Gary Peek]

Can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit errors
when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces errors?

(not a tables vs CSS question)

[Spartanicus]

Gary Peek <my********@myc ompanyname.comw rote:

>Can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit errors
when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces errors?

You are confused, using tables for layout causes problems, not errors.

>(not a tables vs CSS question)

But it is.

--
Spartanicus

[Zilbandy]

On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:58:05 +0000, Spartanicus
<in*****@invali d.invalidwrote:

>>Can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit errors
when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces errors?

You are confused, using tables for layout causes problems, not errors.

>>(not a tables vs CSS question)

But it is.

So, what you're saying is you don't have an answer to his question. :/

--
Zilbandy - Tucson, Arizona USA <zi*@zilbandyRE MOVETHIS.com>
Dead Suburban's Home Page: http://zilbandy.com/suburb/
PGP Public Key: http://zilbandy.com/pgpkey.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Spartanicus]

Zilbandy <zi*@zilbandyRE MOVETHIS.comwro te:

>>>Can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit errors
when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces errors?

You are confused, using tables for layout causes problems, not errors.

>>>(not a tables vs CSS question)

But it is.

So, what you're saying is you don't have an answer to his question. :/

What you are demonstrating is that you've not understood neither the
question, the answer, or usenet. Oh well.

--
Spartanicus

[Gary Peek]

Spartanicus wrote:

You are confused, using tables for layout causes problems, not errors.

Very, well, can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit
problems when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces these problems?

[Spartanicus]

Gary Peek <my********@myc ompanyname.comw rote:

>You are confused, using tables for layout causes problems, not errors.

Very, well, can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit
problems when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces these problems?

Using a table for layout purposes causes problems in all browsers,
nesting tables makes it worse.

Search the archives of this group and it's stylesheet sister group to
find out what problems (it's been discussed at length at least a few
hundred times before).

--
Spartanicus

[VK]

Very, well, can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit

problems when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces these problems?

Are you having some problems, expecting some problems or just curious?
One day many years ago - being bored and in a bad mood - I managed to
hang up NN4.5 on 8th level. But as I forced a Flash movie in the
top-right cell of each table that experiment was not clear. :-)

Purely theoretically I wouldn't expect problems at least until 32-bit
overflow which means 4,294,967,295 nested tables. But the chances are
high that long before that it will trig UA's AID (Anti-Idiot Defence
:-). With the modern DOM methods you can easily conduct an "on denial"
test yourselve by dynamically generating and inserting tables onto your
page.

[Gary Peek]

VK wrote:

Are you having some problems, expecting some problems or just curious?
One day many years ago - being bored and in a bad mood - I managed to
hang up NN4.5 on 8th level.

Somewhat out of curiosity, but I was playing around with a
nested table layout, example at:
http://www.garypeek.com/web/tablemadness.htm

I had heard that some older browsers choked on things like this,
but what wondering how deep it had to be to cause this.

I'm not planning on using something this deep, but I don't
have any heartburn using something less complicated.

Do you think I'll piss off anyone if I ask how far down the
text needs to be before the search engines won't find it? :)

[Ben C]

On 2006-11-01, VK <sc**********@y ahoo.comwrote:

>Very, well, can anyone tell us the browsers/versions that exhibit
problems when tables are nested too deeply? And how many levels of
nesting produces these problems?

Are you having some problems, expecting some problems or just curious?
One day many years ago - being bored and in a bad mood - I managed to
hang up NN4.5 on 8th level. But as I forced a Flash movie in the
top-right cell of each table that experiment was not clear. :-)

Purely theoretically I wouldn't expect problems at least until 32-bit
overflow which means 4,294,967,295 nested tables.

You could get problems much sooner than that if the table formatter
implementation is recursive (and doesn't have an AID). Eventually you
will run out of stack space.

But the chances are high that long before that it will trig UA's AID
(Anti-Idiot Defence
:-). With the modern DOM methods you can easily conduct an "on denial"
test yourselve by dynamically generating and inserting tables onto your
page.

This would be a good test to try, since a stack overflow is a security
vulnerability.

[VK]

Somewhat out of curiosity, but I was playing around with a

nested table layout, example at:
http://www.garypeek.com/web/tablemadness.htm

It's appropriately named "tablemadne ss" so I hope you didn't take it as
a design idea of any kind ;-)

I had heard that some older browsers choked on things like this,
but what wondering how deep it had to be to cause this.

Well, at the time of Browser Wars the speed and the reliability in
rendering table cells was one of major promo points of both Netscape
and Microsoft. There were special table test suites consisting of
hundreds colored cells in multi-nested tables and both periodically
organized a la Formula-1 races :-) by watching how quickly their
browser will fill the page if the competitor chocks on it or behind.
The results (if beneficial) were proudly announced on the company site.
Crazy times :-) Anyway I would say that the hardest way to nock out any
of post-war browsers is by using tables. All lesser-effective
algorithms were sorted out and eliminated long time ago.

I'm not planning on using something this deep, but I don't
have any heartburn using something less complicated.

If you decide for some reason to use table layouts, your heartburn has
to start automatically on the third level and should not be remedied by
any pils but only by re-thinking your layout. :-) :-|
The only exception is if you are a QA tester in a browser making
company.

Do you think I'll piss off anyone if I ask how far down the
text needs to be before the search engines won't find it? :)

As down as it's needed to find a long enough continuous text. How long
- that is engine specific, I don't know.