Re: Re: PHP programming strategy

On Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:28:32 +0100, ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk (Ashley Sheridan) wrote: ....... >> >> Nested tables are the devils playthings! >> >> I must be the devil, then. I enjoy playing with them. And if they're done right they >> seem to work on every system I have tried them on. Granted Dreamweaver design mode gets >> its knickers in a knot if you nest them more than about 4 deep. >> ........... >> >> That's the joy of HTML errors - often the output will appear normal until you make >> some >> minor, and apparently irrelevant, change, when it all goes haywire. >> >> >That's not the only point. If you're on a slow connection you'll notice >the issue. Some browsers only start displaying the page once all the >layout data has been loaded. I've seen some sites with nesting levels of >7 tables deep sometimes, and that's just a mess. I'm also unsure how >text/speech/Braille browsers deal with complex table sites too. I once watched a blind man go through one of my sites. I was apprehensive because I had no made no attempt to achieve compatibility, and had not bothered with any alt = '' declarations. The images were all in their own tables, and they all had titles, and he said that because of this the site was relatively good. > >And tables shouldn't be used for layout, use CSS instead!... I was talking to another web designer last night. He started life as a designer, and said that he liked CSS because it was written by designers. On the other hand I started life as a programmer (well I really started life as an engineer), and I find CSS hard to understand, and harder to write. I can readily produce what I want with tables, but I have no idea how I could achieve many of the results I get with CSS alone. How, for example, could I otherwise achieved the following effect, which displays an image with a border slightly darker than the background, and with the title and subtitle inside the border? <table class="pfm"> <tr> <td> <img src="Images/Nxxxxx.jpg" width="210" height="300"> <p class="nrmltextn">Yanni Nxxxxx </p> <p class="notetextn">Sally Riordan Scholarship, 2007- </p> </td> </tr> </table> (And the thing that really astounds me about CSS is that they never thought of putting in constants. Instead of being able to specify a set of colours, and then simply quote them in the CSS whenever they are needed, I have to specify them in PHP, and then encode them into the CSS every time I use them, which is a real pain in the XXXX. The total lack of diagnostics is another real pain.)