Camen Design Forum

Tables for layout

append delete Martijn

Since a lot of you people have arrived here due to an interest in Kroc’s articles many will be interested in web standards and practise. I just read this and thought it to be the oddest thing in the past years of HTML spec writing ever:

“The W3C HTML Working Group decided that when you put ``role=presentation`` on a table element it can be used (in a conforming way) for presentational purposes.” — Anne van Kesteren ¶ blog.whatwg.org/…

“[T]he HTML Working Group hereby adopts the ‘Allow tables to be
used for presentational purposes’ Proposal for ISSUE-130.” — Sam Ruby ¶ lists.w3.org/…

I can’t say I like this. Instead of getting people to make their websites better you will get people slapping the ``role="presentation"`` on everything.

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append delete #1. Kroc

I think this is for the benefit of crappy tools producing crappy markup, like Dreamweaver. There will always exist crappy developers, and crappy tools, so if at least we are getting them to mark their crap, as crap, then browsers can ignore the bad markup and navigate more cleanly.

append delete #2. JBark

I wonder why is there a need to use the table tag at all. If anyone wants to use some of the advantages of tables, you can always use css, without having to use the whole table markup mess. display: table-cell works fine for me. Not to mention that floats can do about just everything.
Although I must add that I do like that tables give multiple columns the same height, so I need less creativity when it comes to backgrounds. But role="presentation" is probably a green light to tables in tables in yet even more tables, not something I'd like to see.

append delete #3. JJ

Eh, I don't think this is a problem.

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