Re: Sightly OT: Design Questions

From: Alfredo Delgado

When you use tables for content layout you end up breaking up
information by what it'll look like on the screen instead of how it
logically goes together.

But how else should it logically go together other than how it looks on the
screen?  HTML is presentation level, not transmission level.  If you want to
send the data to the client completely presentation-agnostic, the best thing
would be to send it as pure XML and then use XSLT to transform it on the
fly.

XHTML still has table tags because they're what
should be used for tabulated data. You can apply styles to these tags
just like any other.

But if you think about it, a typical business application is all about
tabular data.  A customer information screen is a table of field names and
values.  An order history screen is a table showing columns of data from
orders.

With a few exceptions, business data is tabular in nature.

Joe