Re: Sightly OT: Design Questions

[Alfredo Delgado <adelgado@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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 so 
one step at a time :) As you know you can apply different style sheets 
to the same XHTML. This allows your content, which may include tabular 
data presented in an XHMTL table, to be positioned according to how you 
want it to appear on the medium at hand -- screen, paper, text to speech 
reader, 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 throw 
a logo into it for that custom value feeling. Your client's logo and the 
user interface elements are independent objects that do not relate to 
the data you're displaying in a table. They do not belong in a nested 
structure intertwined with the business data. Since business data is at 
the heart of the page in a tabular format why would you want to hack 
your way through a sea of <tr><td></td></tr> tags just to get to the 
dressing on the sides? Templates can quickly get unnecessarily complex 
and difficult to maintain if the page is a series of interdependent 
table cells.

Alfred