Plan B Website

[thelace]

I can see the benefits of learning how to do this properly, learning code and all that, but I'm not in IT and the amount of IT guys on here that look like they've struggled, often giving up shows the dedication to learn the craft properly.

This is a Plan B, a bit of fun, might earn me enough for a bag of chips on a Friday night type of thing. Hence there's a small budget (I don't really want to buy software and there's certainly no budget for paying someone to do it).

I would like to learn web design proper at some stage and will spend time and effort developing my site over the years, even if it's just for fun and not earning me a stitch.

I'm gonna have a play around with Joomla tonight. As none of you have suggested going with the site creation templates offered by easily and the likes, I'll take that as a no-no!

We'll see how easy this is over a wet and wild bank holiday weekend

[d000hg]

HTML is easy if you know what the term "semantics" means in that context and how to apply that knowledge to your content. Tables-for-layout are easyish, in the way Spectrum Basic was easyish, but don't really convey the impression of being competent (although they do convey the impression of being incompetent). CSS is reasonably complex, but understanding it from the inside out makes it a lot easier.

I've still never seen a decent argument why tables are bad for layout, you only ever hear two things:
1)Very snobby "you're an idiot if you use tables" comments with no actual facts (like a CUK thread )
2)Quite snobby "tables are for content not layout, you idiot" comments.

However if my table-based design renders right on all major browsers and is standards compliant, who gives a crap? Typically, I'd probably use a combination of divs & tables on a complex layout, doing everything in <div> is just painful.

You seem to know this stuff, can you give a non snobby argument why tables are bad, that doesn't rely on "because they are, everyone knows it"? Serious question...

[realityhack]

http://phrogz.net/CSS/WhyTablesAreBadForLayout.html

Edit: They don't mention valid XHTML or SEO, but thought it worth posting.

[PRC1964]

http://phrogz.net/CSS/WhyTablesAreBadForLayout.html

Edit: They don't mention valid XHTML or SEO, but thought it worth posting.

With the exception of the screen reader issue, the other reasons listed are not major concerns (IMO) for most small websites.

Mind you, my main website uses classic Asp, tables and iframes so I expect to be treated like a pariah.

[NickFitz]

You seem to know this stuff, can you give a non snobby argument why tables are bad, that doesn't rely on "because they are, everyone knows it"? Serious question...

It's possible to use a hammer to put screws in. But would you employ somebody who actually did that to work on your house?

The only reason tables were ever used for layout, rather than their intended purpose of marking up tabular information, was to cater for browsers such as Netscape Navigator 2 and Internet Explorer 3, where there was quite literally no other way of implementing designs that went beyond the absolutely basics. Layout tables were a hack, and a pretty damn ugly hack at that; but we had to make the best of the minimal toolset at our disposal.

This hasn't been the case for over ten years. We have screwdrivers now, so we really ought to use them.

There are numerous other arguments relating to maintainability, accessibility, flexibility, SEO, rapid development (a competent front end developer can implement a complex design in CSS much faster than by using tables), cross-browser compatibility (seriously - the problems relating to that died out years ago, and even IE 6 only usually needs two or three fixes), and so on.

I would post some worthwhile links, but I'm just about to leave ClientOrg and head off for some dinner. I'll dig some up later. In the meantime, have a browse through the hundreds of designs in the CSS Zen Garden, and consider the fact that every single one is using the same HTML...

[Zippy]

Tables are bad for layout because -

Actually they are not necessarily. If you are displaying data that makes sense in a table format (Premiership league table, for instance) then they are fine (prob not what you meant)

The real problems occur for people using talking browsers (tables within tables etc.). The browsers will struggle to make sense of them.

NickFitz will doubtless tell you I'm over simplifying/talking bollocks later.

[NickFitz]

Tables are bad for layout because -

Actually they are not necessarily. If you are displaying data that makes sense in a table format (Premiership league table, for instance) then they are fine (prob not what you meant)

The real problems occur for people using talking browsers (tables within tables etc.). The browsers will struggle to make sense of them.

NickFitz will doubtless tell you I'm over simplifying/talking bollocks later.

On the contrary: HTML tables were created for the specific purpose of marking up tabular data. A league table is a good example - after all, it's even called a table.

I always find it amusing when over-enthusiastic proponents of "semantic markup" waste hours of their lives building a load of CSS that renders some complex set of nested lists in a tabular manner. The <table> tag and its associates are the semantic markup for tabular data.

FWIW, Gecko (the rendering engine used by Firefox et al.) includes a big chunk of code that tries to work out if a table is being used as a table, or for layout, in order to avoid bothering assistive technologies in the latter case. Unfortunately, like most heuristics, it's going to suffer from false negatives and false positives.

[d000hg]

In the meantime, have a browse through the hundreds of designs in the CSS Zen Garden, and consider the fact that every single one is using the same HTML...

Seen it a million times. Not sure why I would want to be able to do anything like that though. It's like demonstrating I can use reflection to load all my code from a DB at run-time

[NickFitz]

Seen it a million times. Not sure why I would want to be able to do anything like that though. It's like demonstrating I can use reflection to load all my code from a DB at run-time

Actually, it isn't

Think in terms of "We have to launch a new design for the website". You can re-do every single one of hundreds of templates built on tables cut precisely to the original design, and then test them all... or you can replace the CSS used by all templates, then test them all. In my experience the latter option is going to take a hundredth of the time, and could make the difference between the project being done or not being done.

Of course I'm assuming graphic designers who create web-friendly designs; but nobody in their right minds would pay good money to graphic designers who treat the web as if it was print nowadays. Those who do deserve the mess they end up with.

[thelace]

you'll have to knuckle down and learn some serious shit.

He said tulip fnark, fnark

Hey, why can't i do that