[thelist] Re: thelist Digest, Vol 7, Issue 44
Diane Soini
dianesoini at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 19 23:29:52 CDT 2003
On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 05:07 PM,
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:
> What would you think about about an approach where the
> overall page structure is a table but, sub elements
> are styled DIV's? [Obviously it makes sense to present
> tabular data like result sets in a table]. Is this
> what you meant by "move most of the presentation into
> the CSS and leave behind only a few layout-by-table
> html structures"?
In the example I was thinking of divs are used here and there, but not
much. You can do it however you want, divs or tables. My limitation was
that the programmers didn't know html well, didn't know what a div was,
and didn't have time or desire to learn about it.
The way I did this was to look at the application visually and define
"things" on the screen, like widgets for doing or displaying things.
So you have a "thing." You define a class (or id) for it. .Grid{}. Then
you define the descendent selectors for that .Grid tr{} .Grid th{}
.Grid td{} .Grid a{} etc. Then all the programmer has to know is if
they want to spit out a horizontal table of data, just make a table
<table class="Grid">. No more attributes or classes need be defined
because it's all in the CSS. All the programmers have to do is make
sure that they use <th> for header cells, <td> for data cells.
Same can be done with divs. Define a class (or id if it is unique) for
it .DivThingy{}. Then define the descendant selectors. .DivThingy a{}
.DivThingy ul{} .DivThingy li{} .DivThingy p{} etc. Then all you have
to do is <div class="DivThingy"> and all the descendents of that div
that were defined will have the correct look and feel. As long as a
structure of html you define is followed. You still have to make sure
the programmers follow your structure. But if your structure is plain
html without a lot of attributes, you will have better adherence, and
cleaner code as well. And when it comes time to change things, you'll
have a lot less work to do, and a lot less people to consult and
instruct.
Doesn't work for everything, but it comes really close and it makes
people happy that they don't have to worry about the attributes and
style stuff.
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