Re: Sightly OT: Design Questions -- WEB400



Joe Pluta wrote:

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.

I'm not against that but IE has a hard enough time with XHTML and CSS soone step at a time :) As you know you can apply different style sheetsto the same XHTML. This allows your content, which may include tabulardata presented in an XHMTL table, to be positioned according to how youwant it to appear on the medium at hand -- screen, paper, text to speechreader, iWidget that hasn't been released yet.

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

Relational data is represented in tables so there's no argument there.However, a web application involves a user interface if merely to throwa logo into it for that custom value feeling. Your client's logo and theuser interface elements are independent objects that do not relate tothe data you're displaying in a table. They do not belong in a nestedstructure intertwined with the business data. Since business data is atthe heart of the page in a tabular format why would you want to hackyour way through a sea of <tr><td></td></tr> tags just to get to thedressing on the sides? Templates can quickly get unnecessarily complexand difficult to maintain if the page is a series of interdependenttable cells.


Alfred