[thelist] What's worse? opinions wanted!!

rudy rudy937 at rogers.com
Wed Sep 10 21:50:42 CDT 2003


> >     What's worse?
> >
> > A page of code with nested tables or
> >
> > A page of code using colspans and rowspans.
>
>
> answer:  both are terrible


okay, this wasn't fair

rowspans and colspans are worse

rowspans aren't so bad, but colspans are tricky

nested tables allow you much simpler control over what goes where and in
particular you can have different amounts of cellpadding, etc, in order to
space things out nicely

with colspans and rowspans, you are taking a chance that the browser will
not assign the right widths or heights

one of the tricks of liquid tables [1] was (note use of past tense) to put a
really thin row at the top, with a 1-pixel high spacer gif to hold each cell
open, to establish the minimum column widths so that colspans don't end up
totally b0rked...

rudy

[1] Liquid Tables
http://evolt.org/article/Liquid_Tables/20/2321/index.html

p.s.  please, if you can spare the time, learn how to lay out a web page
without using tables



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