My Rant On Designers Using Tables

Sun, 2008-04-13 02:43

I have been spending my day converting a design made by a local college student. It has been a very emotional experience. I spent the first hour randomly randomly throwing out curses because I was really unable to focus my anger well. I settled down a bit after that and focused my wrath on the local university. It is beyond all belief that a modern institution of higher learning would teach methods that do not scale in the real world.

I don't really have anything against tables if they can be made to work. What I am talking about here is a design so inflexible that if the content is too large you just need to change the content. Those kinds of tables.

The design itself is very nice. I do hope the designer does not think I have done it an injustice when I somehow plug it into Drupal.

Filed under:

web development

I recently saw a guy fresh

Sun, 2008-04-13 03:16

The Dude Dean

I recently saw a guy fresh out of AI of Fort Lauderdale that was using images with words on them for the buttons on a web site. SIGH.

Yeah

Sun, 2008-04-13 07:43

Karen

This has those too.

Drupal has it's dirty bits as well

Sat, 2008-05-03 19:24

SteveO (gswd)

I have seen listed in the themes section of Drupal numerous table based themes. I then say to myself, "self- hit the next button and move on why don'cha." And then I do. Tables are great for .... tables. That is what I was taught in my FSU classes (go Seminoles - *not really*), but then again they were teaching us to be accessible to government standards.

It is true

Sun, 2008-05-04 21:58

Karen

and it is getting better. A few releases ago it with difficult to theme Drupal using a tableless design because of the admin section. Today the admin section has been improved with tables only in a couple of panes (I think the themes pane and also modules), and those two tables have been reworked to perform better as well. Also it is possible to use a separate theme as an admin theme.

I once spoke with a blind person about accessibility. He showed me a site that he considered highly usable. It was built with tables, and yep some were nested. This was a few years ago, but CSS based sites were not unheard of. I was surprised that he would consider that site a good example.

There are still some great looking sites being built with tables for layout. I still have some sites on the net with one three column table providing basic structure. I doubt I will build another one like that, but that setup does work and is easy to maintain.

What I liked about Drupal even way back when was that you could get rid of the layout tables easily and without hacking core. When I first started using Drupal I could not find another full featured CMS that offered that. I think it is fine that Drupal.org accepts themes built with tables. A lot of people won't even care if it gives them the look they want.

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