Use of Tables for formatting, a cheeky question Options

[James]

As my subject suggests, this is a bit of a cheeky question, but I have to ask.

When you strongly advocate not using tables purely for fomatting purposes, why does the WDG site use tables extensively to control its page layout?

Kind regards, James

[pandy]

IFAIK the rest of the site doesn't use layout tables. The forum does. It could be argued that most forum "views" are indeed tabular. But the forum uses (more pointless) layout tables too and it doesn't go easy on them. I'm afraid that's the state of most forums of this kind, even if there are exceptions.

[James]

IFAIK the rest of the site doesn't use layout tables. The forum does. It could be argueed that most forum "views" are indeed tabular. But the forum uses (more pointless) layout tables too and it doesn't go easy on them. I'm afraid that's the state of most forums of this kind, even if there are exceptions.

Thanks Pandy ...

A bit of off topic humour ... You used to have a pic of a pleasant faced, balding, man on your posts, when I came back to the WDG forum after an absence. My wife once asked, with a touch of suspicion in her voice, "Who is this 'Pandy' you are always messaging?".
I replied, "Just a guy who is a member of the WDG, helping me with my Web design".
She said "Are you sure? - sounds like a girl's name to me".
"Absolutely sure", I replied, confidently, "I'll show you his picture" ... and, of course, when I did so you had changed from being a balding man to a volputuous blonde.
"Guy, huh? Yeah ... right!".

Kind regareds, James

[Darin McGrew]

The last I heard, pandy was really a Swedish grandmother. :-)

Anyway, yes, the forums use tables. As pandy implied, the relationship between the various widgets associated with a single post are complex, and while they may not be strictly "tabular", a table is probably a reasonable compromise. (I use "layout" tables myself for captioned figures, since HTML 3.0's captioned figure elements are long dead.)

As a purely practical matter, we needed to use a prewritten forum system. Choosing one was a matter of picking the lesser of the many evils, and then cleaning up the chosen evil as much as we could. There are still a lot of issues with the system we're using, but it used to be much worse. And the others we looked at were worse yet.

What annoys me more than the tables is the way fonts are specified as being smaller than my default font. I end up enforcing a minimum font size that is barely smaller than my default font size, because I end up using the minimum font size all the time here. But sites that don't leave my font size alone have been a pet peeve of mine for years, because I've been using high-res displays for years, and have known how to configure my browser's font size pretty much the whole time. (The font size used to be on the browser's main toolbar, not buried under half a dozen layers of preference menues.)

But I haven't had the time to fix it myself, and the other WDG members have plenty on their plates, too.

[pandy]