BlameThePixel!

yeh. It would have been good if they tought us something useful in IT. I think the most pointless thing we did was that lesson on copying and pasting, when the teacher had never even heard of ctrl+c / ctrl+v... I think I've mentioned that a few times now .

And they should teach it propery, like RM says. If you're doing english the teacher doesn't go around teaching you to use slang in your essays, so it should be for IT...

What's so wrong with tables (ReadMe said something about it)? BTP uses tables, right? And what would the alternative be?
No offence, I'm just curious.

css?

divs & css is the alternative. The good thing about the CSS is that you can use alternative stylesheets and rearrange everything in a different manner. It's pretty good stuff. I don't know if I'd be able to make btp look like this with CSS alone... probably with a bit of work, I guess. I think the float attribute may be useful, but I don't really know...

Using only divs and CSS to make it look like this is hard as ****. You need to be an expert if you don't want it to look crappy on lower resolutions.

hi, i'm an expert.

The main reasons for abandoning tables are accesibility and semantics. I visit another forum that provides coding help to anyone who wants it, and it's full of CSS and XHTML zealots. with good reason.

Many countries are introducing new laws that mean your business must give equal opportunities to diabled customers, the UK's laws come into effect in october. I'll come back to this point while i look at semantics however.

Semantics, for anyone who doesnt study english, is about meaning. Each tag in HTML has a meaning http://w3.org/TR/HTML4 will tell you them all if you're interested. Tables are intended to display tabular data, like a tables of database results for example. Using them for presentation is just plain bad semantics. You should instead either use the relevant tags for this kind of data - lists for menus, p for paragraphs etc. Items with no semantic meaning (like a header section) should use a semantically empty tag - like div or span.

So back to accessibility. When you think about dsiplaying our site on different machines, does anyone consider perhaps the display on a wap enabled phone, or a PDA how about a screen reader? what if they cannot display your bloated tables code?

If we truly separate layout from content then stylesheets can be applied by device, and those that cannot display stylesheets will just get our plain old unformatted xhtml code.

heres a link commonly thrown at the unconverted over at http://www.codingforums.com :
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold

you may also want to check out this post:
http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?p=181585#post181585

Would this be proper use of a table?










< /TR>

Encounters: Township of Narshe

Name	HP	MP	EXP	GP	Strength	Weakness
Lobo	27	5	37	35	Nothing	Fire
Guard	40	15	48	48	Nothing	Poison
Vomamoth	115	30	50	90	Nothing	Fire

All the tag stuff is in caps because this is from a long time ago...

yep, that tabular data all right

OK, I see why you shouldn't use tables. How bad my new site is almost finished then, it's using tables. A bit late to change...

noob noob noob
boobs boobs boobs...lol

edit by zog: I know you were being on topic, but it's still spam.

woo, my libraries internet café is running some summer courses in web design, i think i'll pop along and see how badly they teach it.