4 ms·

The point of CSS is to separate presentation from markup. This approach uses a hierarchy of divs to define presentation. If that's alright with you, may as well

by scorxn 17y ago

The point of CSS is to separate presentation from markup. This approach uses a hierarchy of divs to define presentation. If that's alright with you, may as well use tables.

ajross 17y ago
But in modern AJAX-y Web 2.0 usage, "markup" doesn't even exist as a distinct storage format any more. To the extent that it does, it's stored in wiki or bbcode or some other cooked "markdown" format. HTML exists in the modern world solely as the presentation layer for a data format defined elsewhere. So what's wrong with putting layout in the presentation layer where it belongs? As it happens, our HTML presentation layer also contains this nice, intuitive mechanism for doing layout using "tables" that works better than pretty much anything else has (anyone remember the XmForm layout widget from motif?). So explain again why we can't use them? Sometimes I get the feeling that the CSS layout nuts still think we're living in 1997 and that all web content is written by hand. That's just not how it is any more.
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Just remember your summary="" attribute and you're golden.
- iron_ball 17y ago
  Having started out as a meticulous standards-centric hand-coder with Allaire Homesite, and having slowly moved toward data-driven apps over the years, I thoroughly agree with you. It is worthwhile to write carefully laid out and styled HTML during the template creation phase, but the idea of HTML as data and CSS as presentation does not reflect the everyday reality of MySQL/XML/whatever as data and HTML/CSS as presentation. edited to avoid a rant about CSS itself.
- scorxn 17y ago
  I'm not saying tables are necessarily wrong. I'm saying that this one-line framework is effectively replacing td's with div's, in that the heirarchy of markup defines the presentation. I don't see what value it adds over tables, given the purpose of CSS.
  - poppysan 17y ago
    Well for one - cleaner code. Even using this "framework" the result is still much cleaner than super nested tables!
irrelative 17y ago
I don't think it makes sense either, but it's not that far off from any other CSS 'framework'

by scorxn 17y ago

The point of CSS is to separate presentation from markup. This approach uses a hierarchy of divs to define presentation. If that's alright with you, may as well use tables.

ajross 17y ago

But in modern AJAX-y Web 2.0 usage, "markup" doesn't even exist as a distinct storage format any more. To the extent that it does, it's stored in wiki or bbcode or some other cooked "markdown" format. HTML exists in the modern world solely as the presentation layer for a data format defined elsewhere. So what's wrong with putting layout in the presentation layer where it belongs? As it happens, our HTML presentation layer also contains this nice, intuitive mechanism for doing layout using "tables" that works better than pretty much anything else has (anyone remember the XmForm layout widget from motif?). So explain again why we can't use them? Sometimes I get the feeling that the CSS layout nuts still think we're living in 1997 and that all web content is written by hand. That's just not how it is any more.

DougBTX 17y ago
Just remember your summary="" attribute and you're golden.
iron_ball 17y ago
Having started out as a meticulous standards-centric hand-coder with Allaire Homesite, and having slowly moved toward data-driven apps over the years, I thoroughly agree with you. It is worthwhile to write carefully laid out and styled HTML during the template creation phase, but the idea of HTML as data and CSS as presentation does not reflect the everyday reality of MySQL/XML/whatever as data and HTML/CSS as presentation. edited to avoid a rant about CSS itself.
scorxn 17y ago
I'm not saying tables are necessarily wrong. I'm saying that this one-line framework is effectively replacing td's with div's, in that the heirarchy of markup defines the presentation. I don't see what value it adds over tables, given the purpose of CSS.
- poppysan 17y ago
  Well for one - cleaner code. Even using this "framework" the result is still much cleaner than super nested tables!

irrelative 17y ago

I don't think it makes sense either, but it's not that far off from any other CSS 'framework'