Poll: Do you write HTML tables from scratch?
Thursday May 10, 2007
I remember when HTML tables were first being used - not just for layout, but for tables in general. They were huge!
But they were so hard to write. It was my first sledgehammer understanding of browser differences - you see, IE didn't care if you left your table cells open or not, but Netscape most emphatically did. In fact, if you left off any table tags, the entire page would often be completely blank. But if you only tested in IE, you'd never know until the VP of Marketing called your desk, "Why is my home page blank?" Ah, those were the days...
Do you write HTML tables from scratch?
- Vote Now
- Yes, every time
- Yes, but only the simple ones
- No, I use an editor
- No, I've never written an HTML table from scratch
If you learned to write HTML tables and then began using an editor, would you say that knowing how to write table HTML helps your design skills? Or is knowing the difference between td and th just one more esoteric fact?
Comments
I’m at a point where I favor minimal use of tables and accessible tables as described in Mark Pilgrims free ebook and website, Dive Into Accessibility.
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
I use tables only for displaying tabular data, never for layout: I favor divs with absolute positioning or (rarely, as with my Classical Politics website) frames.
Since I do all my HTML in TextEdit or Notepad, I do all my HTML tables in TextEdit or Notepad.
I think it would a better option to use DIV tags rather than tables. It reduces the code length and gives you a more clean and tidy code…Which is often easy for the crawlers….and ofcourse if you edit your site later…
The latest version of dreamweaver is found best for me with CSS
Tables where never made for layout. Learning how to code in CSS would be a much better use of your time.
Dean… that book is pretty cool, I had time to read the first few chapters. It has a really neat approach to explaining why accessibility is important….
I think knowing as much as you can about anything in web page design helps you become a better designer. I always want to know what some does or will be doing before I put it into my pages.
I admit I need to get more savvy with CSS to limit my use of tables. When you’ve done something for so long, it’s hard to give it up.
Dave - The presumption that anyone who uses tables for layout doesn’t know how to code in CSS is false.
Yes, I found that being able to understand each tag, is a Big Help.
Yes. Absolutely!
I began coding with Notepad and often use it yet. I had to learn all TABLE tags, their parameters / attributes, and value types and their limits because until CSS was develooped and became a W3C Recommendation, layout and positioning could only be accomplished with tables.
Early on, Microsoft built far more and greater flexibility into tables than Netscape, which led to Netscape’s demise because Netscape considered dominance would retain leadership. Now, because of similar arrogance and a lazy mindset, Microsoft has fallen behind.
Through hand-coding tables, I learned pixels, points, percentages, picas, and ems. However, I prayed for styles, and God (or W3C and the browser makers) answered my prayers. I now use tables only for tabular data and DIVs, SPANs, and other tags with styles for many wonderful styling effects. I can not say enough for styles.
Nonetheless, it is important to note that learning to manipulate tables through their attribute details taught me a lot about page layout and design, which has served me well with styles and in repairing the work of others who still have not caught up with current Web design technology.
I used to code tables from scratch but more recently I have set up a form along with some JavaScript to generate all the table tags for me. Makes sure I get the legend, colgroup and tbody tags in the right place in the table and don’t leave out any of the necessary closing tags.
Knowing how to write table HTML definitely improved my design skills.
I am so glad that I learned HTML ‘the hard way’ before I learned Dreamweaver! I took a class to learn DW and all through the class I kept saying Wow! and I couldn’t understand why my classmates weren’t as impressed as I was! I was thinking things like: ‘This is going to save me so much time!’ and I can select entire rows to make changes to!!’ I remember the old days when you had to change the first in every row if you wanted the column’s text to be bold or the background to be a different color! DW made all of that simpler!
I do think that knowing HTML helps because if there is a mistake you know where to go to fix it! An extra close tag somewhere can cause your entire table to disappear and if there is nothing in the design view in DW, then your only option is to go to the code.