[thelist] real men code by hand...

Ben Henick persist1 at io.com
Sat Mar 16 20:50:01 CST 2002


Tips first, since this is easily the most offtopic post I've written in
months.

<tip type="Avoiding nested tables" author="Ben Henick">
It is tempting to build nested tables, because their use cuts down on
arithmetic as part of the layout process.

However, they are atrocious resource-hogs (especially when rendered by
Netscape 4).

There are three things you can do to work around this.

1.  Use your colspan and rowspan attributes liberally.
2.  Calculate the columns of your table by hand, and specify those columns
in the first row:

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr>
    <td width="108"><img src="trans.gif" width="108" height=""
      alt=""></td>
    <td width="432"><img src="trans.gif" width="432" height=""
      alt=""></td>
    <td width="180"><img src="trans.gif" width="180" height=""
      alt=""></td>
  </tr>
  <!-- Your REAL table starts here -->
  ...
</table>

This will all but eliminate any layout bugs or ambiguities that might
otherwise result from a conscientous effort to avoid table-nesting.

Trivium:  When Netscape first supported table markup as part of Netscape
1.1 in 1995, one the strongest recommendations made in their Tag Reference
was to avoid the use of nested tables.

In situations where you can neglect Netscape 4 or remove presentation
support for NN4 users, you can also use the follwing CSS to create a two
column layout within a single table cell (which would otherwise militate
toward the implementation of nested tables):

#LeftCol  { float: left; width: 48%; height: 100%; text-align: right; }
#RightCol { width: 48%; height: 100%; text-align: left; margin-left: 3%; }

Appropriate assignment of DIVs (and careful control of typesetting) would
then result in a nice specifications table layout within the context of
your table cell (but won't look so hot in Netscape 4).

</tip>

<tip type="Manual production workflow in Windows" author="Ben Henick on
behalf of Rudy Limeback">

This is actually in two parts.

If you thought templates were important in Dreamweaver, that hold nothing
on their importance when working by hand.

Further, the need for a freeze - wise under any circumstances - is made
critical in an environment where the control of manual markup is made
necessary by project requirements.

Get approval of the templates before you go into full production, in stone
if not in blood.

The consequence of a failure to do so will be a lot of time updating
layouts at some manager's whim, or at best several minutes writing and
testing an appropriate library of regexp's that will execute the needed
change in one step.

Also - in Windows, Windows Explorer is your friend when doing lots of
production within a single directory.

Dragging the file you want to edit from Explorer into your production
sfotware saves a tremendous number of keystrokes and/or mouse clicks.

</tip>

On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, rudy wrote:

> > Would it be equally as inflammatory to respond that while
> > hand coding is practical and important to know it's usefulness
> > for entire sites went out with the strapless bra?
>
> when did the strapless bra go out?

Presumably, when the WonderBra and its competitors came in.

> what do women wear under strapless gowns?
>
> and speaking of which, why are they called pantIES when there's only one of
> them, and A bra when there's... oh, never mind

*LOL*  Ladies...?

I wanted to use rudy's message to interject that stapless brassieres,
while pleasant to behold (from this gentleman's point of view) are not
in any event missed/  *grin*


--
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
"We will disguise ourselves as a cow."
"Oh!" (giggles) "That was it exactly!"




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