[thelist] FF table padding?

Wed Jan 3 17:18:59 CST 2007

Tris wrote:

> http://w03-joshua.exalia.net/BrainPower/
> 
> On the above URL in FF, the display table has gaps.. but on IE.. it does not?
> Can anyone explain why?
> 
> (I know I know, tables are bad.. though I've never really understood why...)
> 
> Tris...

Well... Firefox is trying hard to cope with the 20 errors shown by the 
W3C validator on that rather simple page. Many of these errors arise 
because you've declared the doctype as HTML strict. To take the 
quick-and-dirty way out, change your doctype:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Things should look a little better in FF then.

Tables are not bad. Tables are perfectly appropriate -- indispensable -- 
if they're being used to display tabular information; information that 
logically fits into tables and rows, basically.

Tables *are* bad when used for the misguided purpose of trying to impose 
a given onscreen lay-out that works in a given browser, as you're doing 
on your page.

I've been managing a large government site for eight years now, which 
receives about 3,000,000 page views a week, and have used tables only 
for tabular information on that site for about 2 years now. I would sure 
as heck never go back to 'bad old days' of using tables to position my 
content (except in bona fide tables, of course.)

Yes, CSS has its deficiencies, and yes, some things are 'easier' to do 
with table tags than with CSS. But that doesn't mean it's right, or good 
for the web.

-- 
Brent Eades	
Almonte, Ontario
http://almonte.com