break away from table layout

Quote: Originally posted by R0B
Hi. I've been laying out webpages for eternity using tables. i decided to try to do it the 'correct' way for once.

Gratz! I'd like to watch this develop as I've been nagging myself to try this.

Re: Netscape scroll. Does Netscape6.x recognize margin:0 as a body element? I know that's what I'd suspect as the issue for NN4.x

Try adding marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" to the body tag just to see if this is the problem.

I feel your pain.

What's wrong with using tables? I like using table and can easily do what I want.

yeah, that's what ive said for a long time zollet and im considering going back to that attitude. even if that's not what tables are intended to do, they work damned good.

problem with using CSS at the moment is you are so limited in what you can do as there is so much that isnt supported, you end up doing way more work trying to get it to work in the main browsers than what you would with normal tables and stuff.

Check out webmonkeys site (think it was them) they use CSS layout on main page, looks pretty good when displayed on browser that supports it. think it was done with seperate style sheets per browser - been awhile

I think CSS is really useful and I use it in all our websites, but there are some things that I think is easier and better to do with tables etc.

You know what they say "If it's not broken, don't try to fix it"

I agree, tables do the job fine right now so until all browsers will display correctly using css why change!

Well, that gets into into a circular cycle.

Browser developers can then say, "designers don't want to use CSS, and they certainly don't seem to be using it now that we're introducing support for it (albeit slowly), so why should we waste our time on it?".

It's gotta start somewhere...

I'll say it again... If it's not broken, why try to fix it?

Maybe he just wants to learn something new

I don't get a scroll bar in Mozilla on RedHat 8.0, nor on Netscape 6.0

I do, however, get a small scroll bar when the 'favorites' tab is opened in IE 5.5

Have you tried marginheight and marginwidth like taff suggested?

I get a scrollbar on the right side without anything open. I never get a side-to-side one whith IE 5.5, just the up-and-down one. But try what taff suggested, maybe it will fix it.

I might try working with CSS instead of tables. There just so many tags with tables it's unreal. But if it doesn't work out I'll stick with tables.

EDIT: I know how you can get rid of the side scroll bar. Edit the #content CSS and change height to 92%. It will fit perfectly after that. As for the width, don't know how to fix that. It works in 1280X1024 Res. at full screen, haven't tried the others. Just mess with the height % and it will work.

Ok, well I spent way too much time (literally 8 hours last night) trying to break my table-loving habit. I read many 'tableless layout' tutorials start to end, i read much of the w3.com site including the CSS1 specs (again), and overall I came out pretty well informed, I have no regrets because i've learned a ton in the last day.

I have come to some informed conclusions which agree with many in this thread. If it's not broken don't try to fix it (especially by replacing it with something that IS already broken to begin with).

I must say after this last night of frustration, mucho props to Suzanne and others who have conquered strict XHTML. I'd still argue that you're handicapping yourselves, but after spending over an hour trying to get less than 150 lines of code (half of it CSS) to validate to no avail you've gained some respect here. Another positive is I seem to have broken my UPPERCASE HTML TAG habit, which someone somewhere once decided was wrong, and i'd like to get my hands around his neck and scream "YOU'RE AN IDIOT" into his ear (markup should stand out from content as much as possible) but despite the fact that i hate lowercase tags, i seem to have broken the UC habit quite easily.

Anyways, regarding the page I was trying to layout tableless. Like I said, i've arrived at some conclusions regarding pure CSS layout. Regarding the suggestions to drop the body margin and padding attributes and use marginheight/marginwidth; I tried every combination possible and no that wasn't the problem. The problem is Mozilla (netscape/kmeleon/etc) for windows at least interprets percentages completely wrong. I didn't believe this until I re-read the CSS1 specs start to finish, and performed numerous tests. Mozilla 1.1 doesn't usually (or ever) take padding/margin into account when calculating percentages.

Also, it seems anything other than '3 vertical columns' is much too complex for the bigshot tutorial writers, or perhaps it's just not practical to attempt anything else at this point.

My solution was to stick to my roots, use what i know where i had to. I used a table to section header/content/footer, which made me quite happy when it worked perfectly in all browsers after fiddling with divisions for hours. I did break the mold a bit though in the content section, and layed out the screenshots at the right with CSS.

So, even though I didn't achieve my goal of creating a tableless layout, I cut my tablecount from what would probably be 3 down to 1 and the results look pretty good in any current browser, i've doubled my knowledge of CSS, broken some bad habits, and overall am a much better web dev.

Feel free to critique the design, keeping in mind that I consider myself a programmer and not a designer, and the goal was to make a professional site quickly and not the prettiest site in the world.

[Plug]If you need an ad server drop me a line :)[/Plug]

http://www.ad-stream.com

Also, something I intended to work in but didn't, I realized 'crutches' such as valign and nowrap which we all depend on in table layout are (seemingly) missing from css. I had the most difficult time performing some of the simplest layout tasks.

Through all of this, i'm not going to argue if table layout is 'proper', in fact i know exactly why it's not proper after my reading frenzy last night, but it just seems the best option at this point.

I e-mailed you Rob.

Critique: Nice so far! In resolutions lower than 1152X864 I found that the images to the right where really hard to look at. The quality of those images could be raised a little. It was especially bad in 800X600. Other than that it looks pretty nice.

you can still use tables in XHTML Strict, just things like align and bgcolor, captions etc you cant use.

Some people believe , ... are no longer useable in XHTML - they are, you can just prepare yourself for the next level using CSS for things like bold etc. just like coding in lowercase and quoting all values now

Quote: Originally posted by zollet
I'll say it again... If it's not broken, why try to fix it?

Let's try a variation on that analogy: the wheel ain't broken; it's just rolling the wrong way.

You say HTML wasn't meant for designing and everything like that, I say maybe they should add some new tags and properties that will open new doors for designers since that is the need these days. Set standards for HTML/XHTML and CSS that all new browsers MUST follow or they're not allowed to market their incomplete product. These should make life easier for all of us.

I suppose that can still be problematic. Since when have browser developers bothered to stick to standards closely? Surely, they will also package their own proprietary pseudo-HTML tags and script functions.

Not only that, to remain on an HTML-based standard would still be "wrong" in that the foundation is still weak because, as has been said, HTML was not meant to be used as it is.

Like any other successful product, HTML needs to be changed to serve today's market's needs/demands and not stick to the past and what it was supposed to be. Also as I said, they should FORCE the browser development companies to follow some rules and compatibilities or they should not be allowed to market their product.

What kind of enforcement can the W3C impose?
If a browser does not comply, what can they do?

Maybe they can make it an Internet law or something. I mean, everyone has had just about enough with the stupid browser differences and I think it is time someone did something about it. I don't know what can be done, but there must be something...

maybe some sort of standards compliance stamp they can put on their product. Kind of like, some toothpaste has an ADA Approved stamp on it, some doesnt. It's not a law that toothpaste makers need to pass ADA scrutiny, but many people won't buy toothpaste without the stamp.

Quote: Originally posted by zollet
You say HTML wasn't meant for designing and everything like that, I say maybe they should add some new tags and properties that will open new doors for designers since that is the need these days.

It was asn't going to be as simple as adding a few more tags and properties to HTML. That coding language was never meant to be used for design and was therefore inherently limited in terms of what it could be made to do. That's how CSS came about. It's a much more thorough and robust system of styling pages, not to mention the accessability issues, cross-device issues, xml etc. etc. It's just a better way. (and it was broken and it did need to be fixed)

Quote: Set standards for HTML/XHTML and CSS that all new browsers MUST follow or they're not allowed to market their incomplete product. These should make life easier for all of us.

Do you remember what it was like back in 1998 when there basically were no standards? I personally think that that the major browsers have done an exceptional job of implementing the standards to this point. Until NS 6 and mozilla came out less than a year ago, there was only one browser, maybe two, that had any sort of reliable standards support. I think it's pretty amazing that now there are 3 or 4 that do. We've come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.

I've alluded to this in other threads but I don't think it's reasonable for us to expect browsers to *interpret* things exactly the same way on the first try. Part of the problem with CSS based layouts right now is IE's (mis)interpretation of the box model, which makes it difficult to get reliable widths with padding & margins.

Do you remember how long it took you to master tabled layouts? It took me years to get everything down, to the point where I could code a layout and have it work perfectly on the first try. Now it's probably going to take awhile to master the CSS layouts as well - so what? It's abetter way.

Quote: I suppose that can still be problematic. Since when have browser developers bothered to stick to standards closely?

Since Opera (and mozilla...)

Quote: Originally posted by necrotic
I e-mailed you Rob.

Critique: Nice so far! In resolutions lower than 1152X864 I found that the images to the right where really hard to look at. The quality of those images could be raised a little. It was especially bad in 800X600. Other than that it looks pretty nice.

damn i almost missed this when it rolled over to 2 pages.

thanks for the comments, i sharpened the images a bit and may create higher res ones altogether eventually, im feeling a bit lazy now. they will link to larger high res screenshots, so either way it's not that much of an issue.

You may find this article on markup revealing, as well as the new http://www.wired.com redesign (CSS).

Like Megan said, it took people a long time to work out the kinks and browser problems with tables -- people are still having issues! CSS is so much easier when you learn how to do it, it really is. But as Busy noted, you can use tables for layout even in XHTML strict.

It's a change, but it's a good change. Leave behind the use of tables for say list images and items. Leave behind the use of tables for blockquotes. Leave behind the use of tables to create padding. Keep what you need for main layout, but cut down on the table usage where CSS can do it better, easier, and it's still cross-browser compatible, as N4 does padding and margins just fine.

Suzanne

P.S. XHTML 2.0 is going to have some nasty changes for you if you can't get up to speed with XHTML 1.0. Not the least of which is how it handles forms. The best part is having the href attribute a global one. Sweet.

If you don't find that HTML has enough elements for you, why not take the leap into XML? Make your own elements, set your own dtd and go nuts.

well i'm a newbie when it comes to webdesign and layouts and all that stuff but i think tables are incredibly usefull and on one page 10 most i've had 10-20 tables all together, so personally i love them :S

As you can tell from my post count, I don't post here often. But I do lurk a bit and each time I do, I come away with my head spinning, as it is after reading this thread.

I have been learning HTML for the past 1 1/2 years and I just recently gotten to the point with my HTML skills that I actually earned my W3C validation button with the template I designed, which I now use on all four of my sites. Then, having succeeded with a validated template, I immediately abandoned it. The validated template was too restrictive for what I wanted to do. I realize this is the wrong attitude, but I still have a decent template.

You know, when I first got into this, I thought "Hey, I'm a smart cookie! I should be able to do this website stuff, no problem!" Boy, was I wrong! You see, I started off with Dreamweaver and learned very fast that was not going to work. Why? Because I came here for a site review and was very politely raked over the coals. It was suggested to me at that time (been over a year now) that perhaps it would be better if I were to learn to hand-write the code, rather than use a WYSIWYG editor. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was busy who made the suggestion. In any case, I took the advice and am now somewhat comfortable writing code by hand and whomever it was that made the suggestion, I thank you because it was great advice.

Now most of you will go to my sig and will have a look at my sites and you will think that it is quite simplistic and I would agree. I meant it that way as a way to hone my HTML and CSS, as well as my table management skills. I personally think I've done well. But if you have taken a peek, you should deduce that my site is very content intensive and would not work without content. You may even recognize the content as the same old, same old, given that alot of it comes from free sources and using free scripts and what-not.

Getting to this point with my design, however, has freed me up to concentrate on the possibility of "catching-up" on other aspects of design and development. BOY! AM I BEHIND! Now there's XML and XHTML and ASP and on and on... WHERE DOES IT STOP FOR GOD'S SAKE!

Now I'm sitting here wondering if I'll ever get done learning and designing and developing long enough to develop content. AND...I haven't even approached the rigors of traffic development. I thought I could do all this alone and I think I've done reasonably well. It seems every time I come here or do a little research I find that I'm not even close!

Perusing this board, I see that most of you are designers by trade or hobby, and that's great. There's alot of great advice and informative conversation here. But my emphasis should be on creating a workable design, which I think I've done. But, for my sites' subjects, my attention should be on content! But how can I concentrate on content when it seems as if I'm going to fall behind the dev curve?

So, I ask again, where does it end? What can I do, or what should I learn, so that I can know that my design abilities will be enough that my viewers can actually see my pages in the future without me having to learn and then to redesign every time a new standard or protocol is adopted? I've been so concerned with design and whether it's cross-browser compatible (I haven't seen my sites in Opera), among other things, that I've had to put content dev on the back burner.

What do you guys think?

PS> About CSS design, I've even tried that and I have a reasonable grasp for such a short-timer. I like it, too. Decided against it for now, choosing instead to stick with my continued HTML learning. I need a little more time with CSS as far as Netscape and such, though I think I've learned well when styling for IE.

the13thMajestic hang in there, every new thing we learn in life has its stumbling blocks, everyone on the web today had a problem with something, and thats what these forums are here for, to help one another.
Every day you type a HTML (or CSS) tag you have learnt more, you have remember that tag and then another and another until one day you know heaps of them and can code a page without looking at refence notes. But your not expected to know every tag and its values etc off by heart. I know HTML pretty well, can code XHTML strict without notes but still forget which one is for table border width, cellpadding or cellspacing. but putting a 5 in one and a 0 in the other soon tells you which is which.
Learn CSS, and use it with HTML, XHTML is much, it's mostly code layout (lower case, quotes, end single tags ...). Forget XML you wont need it at this stage if ever. CSS is your friend and once you grasp the basics you'll find it helps in making your work easier (less tags to use) and more flexability.
As for where does it stop? it wont, its like anything in life, it evolves, but practice is the key, remember every time you type a tag you've learnt more. sure it sounds stupid but its true.

And your sites look good, and bet your daughters are be proud

IMO, it's not about knowing it all, but about knowing what you need. All you have to keep in mind when you write code is standards.

Agreed, the standards have been shifting quite a bit recently, but it's only for the better.

Oh and those are nice sites you have in your sig. Really good content. *bookmarks sites*

Majestic: I was about to start a new thread on this theme just the other day. It *is* daunting! Sometimes I think that the only way to really stay on top of all the evolving concepts is to sacrifice the time to actually put things into practice.

I do this for a living - have for 3 years now - and am still falling behind. I've yet to touch xhtml for example. I can blame lots of things such as time constraints, client requirements, and backwards compatibility concerns. Too busy in the "now" it seems to look too far ahead. I sometimes fear that this is going to catch up to me.

Don't get me wrong, I *do* evolve. I wasn't using CSS to the extent I am now, for example. But I do find that I can't afford to be either a purist or too cutting edge.

For example, I use tables too much but hey - it looks good, everything works and the client wants it by Friday.

Does this mean I'll never move ahead? No way - I'll just be a little slower out of the gate. Fortunately, there is quite a distance between the cutting and trailing edges. Odds are that the style or content of my existing projects will be out of date before the code is.

The main advice I have is find people you respect to work with. Find those people to cover your gaps. Most people can do everything for their own sites because they are willing to invest 40 hours to do 2 hours work. That's not viable for running a business.

When you find people you trust to do the backend programming, the graphics, the code, the content, the traffic, wherever you aren't strongest, you will find that you will learn some of the details of these things as you go, without the pressure of thinking you need to do it all on your own.

Networking is your best friend in business. No one, NO ONE, can do it all on their own without limiting (sometimes severely) the type of work they take on.

Magestic - my opinion (and this is just me, I'm sure others will disagree) is that the most important thing is the audience. Your users aren't going to care if your page validates, or if you're using the latest standards, or whatever. They're going to want some good content, a nicely functioning site and things like that. So, if I were you I would concentrate on that end and transition into some newer technologies when you have the time and motivation. I don't know a lot of the stuff you mentioned there and have no intention of learning some of it for the time being. I did start on PHP awhile back but that had to go to the back burner when things got busy. So what? It's okay to not know everything - you don't *have* to be authoring according to the latest standards all the time. I don't have any intention of switching to CSS layouts in the forseeable future - might be something fun to play with when I have some time, but for right now tables to the job well enough. It all depends on where your priorities are.

One thing you could look into is finding some other people to help you with content. I'm a webmaster of a site that requires virtually no work from me because other team members take care of the content (and they even update the html pages). So, I'm sure it doesn't come close to validating, and I really don't care as long as I don't have to deal with it every day. I just step in when code issues come up that they can't handle. It's still a great site, it's got a good user base, and the content developers are doing a great job with it. The key is that the team is really dedicated to the topic and are perfectly happy doing this for free.

Free - that's another key thing that I'm guessing you'd be concerned about. It would be nice to gather a complete team of developers to work on every aspect of the site. But, of course, that assumes that you have money to pay them. Gymn.ca doesn't have that luxury and I'm guessing your sites don't either. So, we just do the best we can focus on providing a site that's valuable to the audience. That's okay.

P.S. Did you post those sites for review at all? I can't remember seeing the versions you have posted now but I may remember seeing older ones. If your old ones were as I (vaguely) remember them, that's a really fantastic improvement you've made!

I do agree with you Megan. Although it is nice to think that we can all code to comply with the latest exacting standards it isn't always possible and as Megan said as long as it works for your audience then that's what matters most.

I was going to learn asp or php but I just haven't got the time I need to do it, so any programming I need doing I pass on to someone I have found that can do it and we work together.

You don't need to get bogged down with trying to do everything!

I'll have to disagree with Megan and Julia -- coding to standards makes the job easier, not harder. It results in lighter pages, better pages (working in more places, including alternative browsers, pdas, et cetera), and it ensures that the content is easy to update.

By using current standards, you keep font tags and such out of the content, which allows the design to change without having to edit the content repeatedly, as well -- this means you can take on more clients and do more work in less time.

ASP, PHP, these aren't standards. XHTML/CSS are.

You don't have to use only CSS positioning to code to today's standards, either. Tables are still viable, even in XHTML 1.0 Strict and beyond, as more than just for tabular data.

It requires a different way of thinking about the design, but it makes things very easy when you code to standards and keep the presentation out of the markup of the content.

I agree with Megan - definitely know your audience.. and your client.

An early slap in the head lesson for me was a site redesign contract I picked up. For the most part, the changes were cosmetic and I underpriced it as I often did in the early days.

This was a fairly large resource site built with Frontpage. What I did was to run through all the code and strip of all the font and related formating tags so that I could apply a stylesheet. This was one of my earliest experiences with CSS. It took hours and hours to clean up all that code but I finally did it, linked up a stylesheet and all looked good. If the client had any complaints, hey - just modify the CSS

Well over the phone, my client thought that it was rather.. well.. plain. He just wasn't seeing what I was seeing. Finally, I asked (yeah - *now* I ask) what he was viewing it on.

Netscape... v3... on a Mac Laptop that had no room to handle a newer browser. Doh!

Man. That site is still up today and is a moving violation as far as coding goes. I did some major search and replace font tag implementations to get it viewable in that freakin dinosaur of a browser.

That was one of my first valuable lessons in this business. It is a good thing that I learned something because I certainly didn't make any money on the job!

Quote: Originally posted by Suzanne
I'll have to disagree with Megan and Julia -- coding to standards makes the job easier, not harder. It results in lighter pages, better pages (working in more places, including alternative browsers, pdas, et cetera), and it ensures that the content is easy to update.

I never said that coding to standards isn't a good idea. It is, and people should be working towards that if they're not already. However, I don't feel that people should be pressured to have perfectly validating sites all the time - especially people who may not be as experienced as you are. I don't think that people should be degraded for not coding to the most recent standards.

In many cases, trade-offs occur in which a webmaster may have to choose between spending time on content and spending time on code. IMHO, content wins every time. For some it will take a lot of time and effort to get something to validate - time that may be better spent on other things. The 13thMagestic could spend her time developing content or she could work on coding skills. Which is more important? IMO, Content.

Personally, I don't want to have to check the code on the gymn.ca site every time one of the content editors decides to update something. It's not worth my time.

Quote: megan: Did you post those sites for review at all? I can't remember seeing the versions you have posted now but I may remember seeing older ones. If your old ones were as I (vaguely) remember them, that's a really fantastic improvement you've made!

Actually, I've only submitted AweQuest.net for review here and that's been at least one year ago and it was terrible. And, yes, though it's somewhat simplistic, it is now a VAST improvement over what it was then, if I may say so myself! As far as resubmitting all four for review now, I don't know. I think that as long as I am happy with them, then it's not necessary. Besides, they are still a little short of finished, with some links not working and such. I may submit them later.

Quote: Megan: I don't feel that people should be pressured to have perfectly validating sites all the time - especially people who may not be as experienced as you are.

I realized as I was writing my current template, having started with a blank EditPad, that it might actually validate. So I wrote the template with this goal in mind. However, when I checked it for validation the first time, I had overlooked a few minor things and corrected them accordingly. But, I kept getting validation errors with the tag and and when I took out the tag and the backgrounds, BAM! I got my W3C button. I stored the button and put that stuff back in. Oh well! A moment of glory after 1 1/2 years of toil and disgust, it was worth it.

Quote: Suzanne: When you find people you trust to do the backend programming, the graphics, the code, the content, the traffic, wherever you aren't strongest, you will find that you will learn some of the details of these things as you go, without the pressure of thinking you need to do it all on your own.

My email address is [email protected] for those who may be interested!

Quote: Originally posted by Megan I never said that coding to standards isn't a good idea. It is, and people should be working towards that if they're not already. However, I don't feel that people should be pressured to have perfectly validating sites all the time - especially people who may not be as experienced as you are. I don't think that people should be degraded for not coding to the most recent standards.

? Pressured? I think that perfectly validating sites are entirely possible, and a reasonable standard -- as far as initial development goes. We all know what clients can do to a site... Even after they have been taught!

I also don't think people should be degraded for anything, however there is no reason to not code to A standard -- even if that's HTML 4.01 Transitional -- because it makes it a lot easier for the developer AND the content creator!

I'm not trying to say that XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 2.0 is the way to go in all cases; the audience, of course, dictates what standard should be used.

Quote: The 13thMagestic could spend her time developing content or she could work on coding skills. Which is more important? IMO, Content.

I disagree -- simply because good markup takes seconds to learn, not hours or days. And would make the implementation of the content far more rapid, actually giving more time for development of said content.

I'm not talking design, I'm taking the content itself, when I say good markup takes seconds to learn. A good designer should be able to make it so the person creating the content needs to close their tags, and use and and properly. That's it. Everything else (design, navigation) could be handled by the developer/CMS/CSS/back-end programming without the content developer having to even consider that these things exist.

Quote: Personally, I don't want to have to check the code on the gymn.ca site every time one of the content editors decides to update something. It's not worth my time.

I agree. And with good design and function, you shouldn't have to, the content developers would be able to add the content easily without even having to learn more than a handful of tags.

See, this is what I mean, every time someone posts anything about writing less than perfect code they get a lecture about it. That's what I mean by pressure, and personally, I don't think it feels very nice.

As you wish.

Quote: Originally posted by Megan
Magestic - my opinion (and this is just me, I'm sure others will disagree) is that the most important thing is the audience. Your users aren't going to care if your page validates, or if you're using the latest standards**

Edit: ** when I use the term "standards" above I mean to use the term loosely. For example, the current unofficial standard for content-intensive site is to use a database driven model which requires knowledge of a server-side scripting language such as ASP or PHP.

Edit 2 - oops, meant to edit my previous post but somehow got a new message instead.

so that would be 2 reservations for the padded cell?

I would have to agree and disagree with whats being said here.
Coding to standards is easy (ish) - yes, saves time and file size - no
I have redone several basic sites with HTML and XHTML (both without font tags) but used more CSS with the XHTML, and in some cases the XHTML files are bigger, especially the Strict versions of them. It's stated around the web CSS is reusable, thats rubbish too, maybe for links and headers but not for layout, boxed, effects etc as there is always that one thing you want different, sure use CSS in the actual tag but then your file size goes up again.

It's a no win situation. IMHO code to what your comfortable with, do what works, but do try validate your work every now and then, you'll actually find it helps you learn. HTML isn't going anywhere, some pages like W3C's will never validate as XHTML.
For me I personaly enjoy that buzz when they do validate, so now I've moved on to section 508 (making sites accessable for people with disabilitys) section 508 works with W3C standards but is harder ti imply than XHTML or CSS and I doubt many valid sites validate to section 508 or WAI .

Know your audience, code for them, waste of time using XHTML 5.6 for IE3 or NS4. but do try challenge yourself now and then, try going for strict in either HTML or XHTML

Good luck to you all

yeah, i could never validate the pages that i make, :S

...just out of curiousity, who here uses that doctype tag? i never do... i find it confusing

Using the DOC tag should become a habit, the browser needs to know what standards to display your page at. You can find some strange effects if you don't, (than again you can if you do).

agreed DOC tags are confusing, here is a site with the list http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch/table.html note some do and dont include the url

I agree, Renegade. I usually just copy and paste them from w3schools.com or let Dreamweaver put it in (although DW puts in some extra stuff which I've been told is wrong... ). I think I saw an artile once about how to read doctypes. I'll see if I can find it...

so, what are the differences bwtween the different doctypes? i odn't get them, xhtml1.0, xhtml1.0 transitional, xhtml1.0 strict, ... i don't use them cause i odnt' get them and how they work :S would some one please care to explain?

To answer that question I'm just going to point you towards this site:

http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp

It does a good job of explaining things and this way nobody has to type out all of that here - it's rather long.

I'll still look for that doctype article in case anyone's interested.

Edit: I don't think this is the one I remember seeing but it does the job
http://www.uninetnews.com/xhtml/doctype.php

here is another one I have bookmarked
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/dom/dtype/dtype-grid.html

Note it mentions these have not been tested on IE6 and IE6 does have DOC tag issues

Quote: Originally posted by Busy
Note it mentions these have not been tested on IE6 and IE6 does have DOC tag issues [/B]

if ie6 don't have doctype issues then do we still need them?

Bear with me, here comes another treatise on standards...

The DOCTYPE is irrelevant if you don't code to standards.

What it is is a little note to the browser about what level of HTML/XHTML you are using to markup the page.

If you don't use it, the browsers will think to themselves "ah, use quirks mode, this isn't any particular type of markup at all, but a mish-mash of html" and then let it all fall as it may.

You may think, well, hmmm, that's not what I want to happen! And you'd be right!

The idea of standards and validation is really to make it easier for the browsers/readers to render the page (by using an accepted set of rules) and the developers to create the page (by using the same accept set of rules). As browsers get more advanced, we are seeing a convergence of thinking on the matter, which means the sloppy coding practices of yesteryear (open tags, single pixel gif positioning, badly nested tags, et cetera, which were de rigeur then, of course) will NOT be displayed well in the future.

We saw this when N6 came out and everyone's pages died a horrible death and all the dhtml stopped working. But then the browsers started adding in quirks mode, so the pages would render more or less okay, but pages with DOCTYPES would render well.

So... What does the DOCTYPE mean? Read the excellent links contributed here, or read below:

^-- url of the actual rules used to display the page, close this special tag (no " />" needed for XHTML, this is not an HTML element.

hth!

Okay, so here's a question for you. The site I linked to above, shows the following:

Quote: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

This is pretty much what Dreamweaver inserts (the bit is a bit different). I can read that page to get an understanding of what it all menas, but I'm wondering about the first part and the last bit. Now, someone was looking at some of my code once and mentioned something about the bit and said it shouldn't be there. The page I linked to above says it is correct (and DW says it is too)... so, which case is right? What about the <?xml ... > bit - that page says that this is sometimes left out when using asp or php, but otherwise it should be in.

The <?xml ... > is optional -- it also kills php/asp pages, though I'm not sure WHY exactly, probably because <? is a short cut (instead of <?php or <?asp) so it gets stuck not knowing what this command "xml" is.

Anyway, lol...

If you're using an XHTML doctype, you should use the xmlns, yes (that person was wrong). Also xml:lang="en" lang="en" for language encoding.

xmlns means "XML Name Space" and it's part of the XML part of XHMTL and really you don't need to know more about that other than it's needed.

But if you want to know about XML Name Spaces... prepare for many long posts!

So for once DW is right?? lol

DWMX I hear is great -- it's only the JavaScript that's a bit iffy...

Now that it's dropped using 4 bazillion tables for positioning, of course.

Quote: Originally posted by Suzanne
The <?xml ... > is optional -- it also kills php/asp pages, though I'm not sure WHY exactly, probably because <? is a short cut (instead of <?php or <?asp) so it gets stuck not knowing what this command "xml" is.

A co-worker of mine tested a page (that I coded using DW MX) with this tag in it on a Mac and said it caused problems there too, although I don't know much more than that so who knows...

DW MX really is wonderful for standards support IMO. It's got a built-in validator which makes it really easy to fix things quickly AND it's got a "Convert to xhtml" command, so you don't have to go through all those old pages and add the closing tags and stuff by hand. I'm really glad to have it around when I come across an older page.

While doing some mindless surfing tonight, I happened upon this very excellent explanation of how current browsers render your non-standard HTML markup. It may help explain why things go so horribly wonky.

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1037910467&order=-1&count=1

It's a wee bit technical if you're not used to the DOM, but it shouldn't be over anyone's head.

thats one horrible page to look at in IE, three words per line, bold and big spacing between letters. ::

Thanks for the link, some really good examples in other pages about browser differences on even simple CSS issues.
quote from one of the pages
"Sigh. We really still have a long way to go before we have interoperable implementations of Web standards"

More on DOCTYPES and a new rendering mode in Gecko (Netscape) which is really exciting:

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/almost-standards/

Okay, so this means no more display:block fix, correct? As long as you're not authoring in xhtml strict. That's a bit of a relief.

also note xhtml 1.1 is xhtml 1.0 strict without the "strict" in the DOC tag, not many changes, can't use lang:en in the html tag ...

Sometimes I think there are a bunch of engineers thinking "how can we break Suzanne's brain?" heh.

I'm not sure about the almost-standards support in current browsers (I don't use table layouts with images very often, so it's not an area I've researched), but it does sound hopeful.

so does TWF validate ? hehe is this forum "up to standard?" lol

I'd guess probably not -- I'm not even going to test it. Here's why:

1. It's a CMS and the moderators and admin would have to edit it directly if the engineers and programmers who created the code didn't make it valid coding (and that's the second leg of the standards, drive, I think, first the browsers, then the tool makers, then the web professionals themselves).
2. There is a ton of legacy coding in here because the forums are a few years old.
3. The nature of forums means the use of many nested tables. Some could be removed, of course, but see #1.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can go through and edit a CMS's output. I have done it (a lot). But it's easier to hire someone like me to create the wireframe in the first place up to spec, then code/program around that.

It doesn't happen a lot yet, but it's starting to happen more. I'd hope to see entirely valid forums coming up soon. EZBoard is a step in the right direction.