m3rajk — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 22:17:38 +0000

btw: demo (when my rents haven't turned off the server on me) can be found at: http://24.91.157.113/findyourdesire/

there's still a few bugs before i go and find a real host.hotmail recently seems to have stopped accepting the mail that gets sent, so when i get a real host i'll also be contacting hotmail, yahoo, lycos, and aol and asking that they stop their killing of the e-mails, and telling them if it's because of complaints that i want the originating ip of every last e-mail with the domain because it means someone's using it without permission.

m3rajk — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 22:05:53 +0000

it's a combination of data and aligning. it really comes into play in the profiles. the profile has a master table that breaks the differnt things up. trying to align everything with absolutes, and yet remain relative to sizes of the users screen and not get distoreded requires a table since there's a mixture of pictures and words. a good deal of the actual data is actually rendered form pages called via iframes (so using NS4.xx is not possible) in order to speed up page loads (i've seen a few sites with a large amount of data coming from a database using only css. the issue is that once the data reaches a certain point this slows the load time incredibly. ie: when my college campus with the t3 during a vacation prio rto graduation, the site i'm thinking of, on a down time, still took 5 minutes to load a profile page. realizing that i'm not that complex, yet rather diverse with what i'm loading i felt breaking it into sub pages in iframes held by tables when using html4.01 would be the best way to create the layout. now that's it's migrated, or mostly migrated to css, it's possible to use divs, but not necessarily a garuntee that i canmake it shift so things are centered.

JeevesBond — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 22:36:16 +0000

Hmmm, think I can get what you're saying Suzanne - the short answer to my post would be something similair to: "It depends"

From what m3rajk has said it appears better to be using div tags (although - as said - he is converting from HTML transitional), are there any rendering issues with Safari and div tags? Also what about Flash? I heard there were problems making that work (apparently Macromedia's fault?).

I learnt a valuable lesson about CSS the other day, and I think it's relevant to what we've been talking about here:
Was looking around for good examples of CSS designs and came across http://www.csszengarden.com/ I thought the site was great, until I turned up the font size in Opera to 30pt (as a result of this thread ) the designs looked stunning at 9pt, but at 30pt most were worse than they would have been using tables.

Moral of the story: Even if your site validates as having correct XHTML/CSS it does not automatically qualify as more 'accessible.' The power, and therefore the responsibility is still in our hands

Suzanne — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 17:31:48 +0000

Depends on whether he wants the table for data or not... I usually live with the spacing issues (Safari, for instance, doesn't support border-collapse yet) for data, as it doesn't harm the look. N4.x puts a lot of space around tables using this CSS for displaying borders, again, I live with it.

For layout, there isn't anything inherently WRONG with tables, they may even be appropriate for certain audiences or very complex layouts that cannot be done as accessibly with CSS (as it would require all absolute positioning). But in general, many layout tables are unnecessary, and add to the bloat when a DIV would be simpler and work the same. Also, using lists instead of TABLE can really make the code cleaner, easier to understand, and easier to control.

JeevesBond — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:04:44 +0000

So it all works now?
I still think you would have been better off using div tags, what do you think Suzanne?

m3rajk — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:43:06 +0000

actually it does explain what's wrong with it... i was setting it for cells, when it works just as i thought when set for tables.

m3rajk — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:36:59 +0000

ok. after reading the link he gave i thought .tabletest td{} created a class (tabletest) and set tds within the the class.

i still don't know what's wrong with my understanding of border-collapse. i thought it made all the boders overlap so that i'd see just one line

Suzanne — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 21:07:14 +0000

nooooo.... your code says that the TABLE CELLS have an auto margin, not the TABLE itself.

/* test classes */
.tabletest td{ /* this is just the part */
border-color:#0000ff;
border-collapse:collapse;
border-style:solid;
border-width:5px;
margin:0;
}
.tabletest { /* this is the part */
border-color:#0000ff;
border-collapse:collapse;
border-style:solid;
border-width:5px;
margin: auto;
}

You need to set the table and the table cells separately -- like Jeeves said.

m3rajk — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 20:48:05 +0000

arg. one problem in using that... the tables lose the margin or something like that because they cease to center in mozilla

m3rajk — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 20:38:15 +0000

Jeeves: it's tested... does EXACTLY what i was trying to do (or so it seems) the only question is: what's wrong with my understanding of border-collapse? i thought it would make all the borders be one. on the other pages with borders, they all act as onenot with the double border as in the one on that page. i don't understand why.

it: it doesnt' look like each cell has it's own border, but rather that they all have one border. that's what i thought the border-collapse:sollapse; was suppossed to cause.

i'm going to try it on the other pages and letyou know if it worked without the border collapse call (which i thinkis missing from them)