Zilbandy <zi*@zilbandyRE MOVETHIS.comwri tes:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 17:20:08 +0000, Spartanicus
Take the false assumption out of the question and the real question the
OP asked was about HTML table vs so called "CSS layouts", this does
however require a capacity to see beyond the question as phrased.
So, if I ask how deep I can nest tables, your answer will be to use
Cascading Style Sheets? Maybe the misunderstandin g has to do with
which side of the pond we live on. :) I'm done with this topic.
I've seen table layout (as in the process of laying out a table, not
the use of a table or tables to layout a page) have (minor but
visually ugly) bugs in all modern graphical browsers, for a
sufficiently complex data table [1] with no nesting at all and
entirely valid HTML code. If there are bugs at nesting depth 0, then
it obviously follows that there are also bugs at all greater nesting
depths.
All complex tables are going to have layout bugs, at the
extremes. Nesting makes it more likely that the complexity will pass
the 'critical point'. So, for example, the table generated by the
pseudocode:
for i in [1..10000] {
print ("<table><tr><t d>");
}
print ("Content");
for i in [1..10000] {
print ("</td></tr></table>");
}
is likely to have bugs (despite all individual tables involved being simple)
Conversely, a sufficiently complex table can have bugs with no nesting
at all.
So your question is unanswerable. (In practice, there's no need to
nest tables at all in the vast majority of situations, and no need to
nest them more than one level deep in the extremely small minority
remaining, so that's not a major problem)
[1] colspans on almost every cell in most rows, and two columns per
month over a 10+ year period.
For the extremely small 'intranet-like' audience who were interested
in the data, it was the best way to present it. Of course, I'd
recommend for general web use breaking the table down into several
two smaller ones - maybe one per year.
--
Chris
