[thelist] Re: CSS technique for forms?

[Diane Soini]

On Thursday, September 9, 2004, at 10:31 AM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:
> John.Brooking at sappi.com wrote:
>
>> Okay, I've been converted to laying out pages with CSS instead of 
>> tables,
>> but also not gone too far the other way by attempting to use only CSS 
>> when I
>> really do a have a rectangular set of values to display. But there 
>> seem to
>> me to be a number of gray areas, and one is them is forms. 
>> Specifically, the
>> standard format of one value per line with a label in front, such as:
>>
>>   Name:  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
>>     Email: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
>>     Phone: XXXXXXXXXXX
>>
> Like this:
> http://work.insoft.ro/contact/dealeri/
>
>> Tables were an easy way to vertically align the labels and the 
>> fields, but
>> of course suffer the same problems as using tables for page layout.

I think tables are fine. Name, Email and Phone are the "column" 
headers, and the fields are the data. It's a table of only one record.

Why it makes sense to me to use tables is because I've worked on web 
applications where the form page and the detail page were the same 
template. So why input fields and data should be considered two 
different things really makes no sense. One is data that is editable, 
and the other isn't. That is the only difference.