[thelist] arguments pro css & xhtml / con tables

Robert O'Rourke rob at sanchothefat.com
Fri Jun 9 10:35:01 CDT 2006


Bill Moseley wrote:
> I just took a designer's layout of a page that was table based and
> changed to css layout.  The designer's page has a content-length of
> 21777, my table-less design has a content-length of 8021.
>   
Liposuction for html..

    I must say i've learnt a lot from this thread. Useful source order 
is something i became more aware of in the last few months. I was 
looking at some of the earlier sites i've made and compared them to more 
recent and well-structured ones on PDAs, a sony mobile and a nokia, our 
set-top box browser and ANT (very basic visual browser you might get in 
hotel rooms).
    The rendering does vary but some typical features are things like 
the lack of column layout support and floats other than images in text. 
Lists can be expanded out, the default background-colour in ANT is 
actually grey... and so on but to cut a long story short it's annoying 
and seems a bit wrong (to me) when you have to scroll right to the 
bottom to find the content etc.. having the navigation at the top i 
think is fine if there's a skip-to-content link (or vice-versa).
    With a logical source order the minimum of alterations via CSS are 
necessary to make a website look great and retain useability on the 
mobile web too.

    Thanks for the advice re. screen readers Ian. Would you say 
accesskeys are the best way to provide navigation on the whole?

    Cheers, Rob



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