Re: lynx-dev Is this List for Lynx users or *just* developers

[Duke Normandin]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 10:22:35AM +0100, David Woolley wrote:
> > is NOT excessive use, and should be rendered by <table> correctly,
> > because at the end of the day, all it is IS 'tabular data'.
> 
> Not in terms of the definition of the table element.   The introduction
> to the Tables chapter in the HTML 4 specfication states:
> 
>    Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content...
> 
> and goes on to explain the problems that this can cause.
> 
> I think the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines can be summarised
> as saying that the use of tables for layout is undesirable, but needs to
> be tolerated in the short term, and only for documents not claiming the
> maximum accessibility level, as better than frames, everything as images,
> etc., but only until CSS positioning is reliably implemented and only if
> the content linearies properly (i.e. reads sensibly, in a logical reading
> order, when the tables (or CSS positioning) are ignored.
> 
> I realise there are even commercial tools whose sole purpose in life
> seems to be to slice and dice pages into narrow columns with many col
> and rowspans, but they are reacting to the market use of an inappropriate
> tool, rather than the W3C position.

I agree in principle with all that you've said. However, given that Lynx
does not support CSS, quoting 'chapter-n-verse' on how webpages should be
created is of little use. Were I not interested in making these HTML docs
that I'm cooking up, Lynx friendly, I would be using CSS to do what I
need. Yes... <table> has been abused. However it seems to me that the
whole issue of 'layout' vs 'content' and the discussions that ensue,
suffers from a bit of chauvanistic dialetics. After all, when a paragraph
is indented (or not) ; or a page of text _is_ broken down into
paragraphs, IMO, that is a form of 'layout'. When nested <ol>s or <ul>s
are used, it can be argued that _that_ also is a form of 'layout'. So to
me, the issue is not whether to use HTML as a 'layout' tool, but rather
whether HTML is being used "excessively" as a layout tool, instead of
using a more appropriate layout scheme.

At any rate, the matter is moot anyway. I've settled on a solution - so
let's all conserve bandwidth and drop this thread. Thanks for your
comments!
-- 
-duke
Calgary, Alberta, Canada


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