T
Travis Newbury
Greg said:
This includes using tables for layout? That validates.
Truer words can not be spoken.
This includes using tables for layout? That validates.
Truer words can not be spoken.
K
kchayka
Travis said:
If the site is for your own personal use, feel free to do whatever you
like, but there's not much point in having a web site if you are the
only visitor. If you don't care, no one else will, either.
But, if you want to reach a particular audience, then the purpose of the
site is for the benefit of those visitors, don't you think? The design
should be determined by what *they* want or need, not by the designer's
whims. If you know the target audience likes stuff like Flash and
gratuitous animation, give them what they want, but don't do it just
because the designer likes it. If you don't know what your visitors
want, you should find out.
Otherwise, you could end up alienating the very audience you're trying
to attract.
T
Travis Newbury
kchayka said:
While probably not the answer most in this group would come up with, I
personally could not agree more.
S
Stephen Poley
The idea that working according to standards impedes creativity has been
voiced before in these groups. It is utter myth. This is obvious if you
take a look at the telecommunications sector: this is far more strongly
governed by standards than the Web is, yet it has produced a flood of
new services and products.
T
Toby Inkster
c.thornquist said:
Except pride.
E
Eric Bohlman
A corrolary is that the greatest artists of all time have been those who
innovated *within* the limits of their media, whereas artists who have
tried to pretend that those limits didn't exist have been relegated to
the scrap-heap of pseudo-artists (those who regard Art as merely calling
attention to oneself).
R
Richard Brooks
c.thornquist said:
[snipped]
How about currency ? A great one would be road or health & safety signs!
I think a lot of Web designs follows the HiFi system analogy. Okay, we
can put a 24-band graphic equaliser but do we really need it. We guys
use our ego's too much in most media. We could add Flash, Javascript,
ActiveX, XML, VML,VBScript and anything else on one page but are we
selling ourselves or the client's product.
In the UK we had a classic case of one TV advertising producer who got
so wild with showing his own talents (the last of the series of adverts
being a family car being driven through a post-apocalyptic world, you
know the sort of thing! Ball bearings being rolled over the road, a man
in a gimp mask with nails poked out of it, solarized colour with the
advert ending with a piano being thrown over a bridge) the customer
ended up not knowing what the name of the product being sold was.
Richard.
T
Travis Newbury
Stephen said:
That statement completely depends on one's definition of creativity, and
if you are including accessibility as part of the standards.
M
me
I agree and your points are valid. I would add that in my experience the
client (or employer) will only allow that which they find appropriate.
Signed,
me
C
c.thornquist
Eric Bohlman said:
What does that mean? Are you referring to painters & sculptors? Musicians?
Carla
M
me
Stephen Poley said:
I have already addressed this here:
But my answer is in no way related to the telecommunications sector
especially considering that from the users point of view the act of making a
phone call has not changed for many decades (i.e. pick up receiver, dial,
talk).
Signed,
me
G
Greg Schmidt
Tables for layout tend to hurt accessibility and search engine rankings,
make designs more fragile and increase page size (and hence download
times). However, you are right that from an SGML point of view they are
valid. It goes to show that, just as there are (rare) occasions where
(very slightly) invalid code is the best choice, there are also (many)
occasions where code that happens to be valid is not the best choice.
G
Greg Schmidt
Well, we had a number of text-specific media too, like FTP, Gopher and
WAIS. If the world was just about text content, then those would have
sufficed, but the physicists that TimBL worked with wanted to be able to
share graphs as well. The WWW does a great job not only of delivering
text, but also graphics (some of which is content, much of it is not).
I don't think it's coincidence that the surge in popularity of the WWW
came with the release of the first graphical browser.
You didn't quote this part of my original:A summary of that might be "valid code doesn't get in the way of the
content".
Perhaps my opening line should have been "The web is experienced
(primarily) as a visual medium."
C
c.thornquist
Greg Schmidt said:
Why do sites built using pure CSS look so similar? Why do they, almost all
that I've seen where it was brought to my attention that they were built
with CSS, look boxy, boring and spread all the way across my 19" monitor?
Including the text! Don't those authors care about usability (as opposed to
accessibility)? Most people can comfortably read only 400 pixels across at a
stretch.
I know you can approximate the layout & look of a site built with tables in
CSS (saw it done in an example on a website), so why do so many CSS sites
look so bad? And so similar? Is it something inherent in coding with CSS?
Tables need not be fragile if the numbers add up. They must be precise.
Carla
A
Alan J. Flavell
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, c.thornquist wrote:
[overquotage snipped...]
Eh? Haven't you discovered windowing systems yet? No web page gets
to spread itself "all the way" across my monitor!!!
(Possibly they didn't reckon with you choosing a ridiculously wide
browser window /and/ using a browser that doesn't implement max-width)
Most people can comfortably read only 400 pixels across at a
That depends on the pixel density of the display! On my desktop
display, that's less than 3 inches, and represents a -very- short line
of text.
This is truly perverse. You want to take a badly-engineered product,
and use good engineering to mimic it? You'd rate to finish up with
many of the disadvantages of both, and few of the benefits. No wonder
you're disappointed.
Nobody claims that CSS is perfect, or that browser implementations of
it are entirely reliable. But at least it's a move in the right
direction, and, if done properly, my perception is that on balance it
rates to produce better results. Of course, it can be that your
standards of "better" are so different from mine that we'd never
agree. But you seem to be doing your worst to put CSS in a bad light,
while "proving" that table layouts enjoy a superiority that IMHO they
don't deserve.
More to the point, why is your perception of them so different from
mine?
The problem with table layouts is that they stubbornly insist on
"working" in situations where they're completely inappropriate.
CSS can be more flexible than that.
Which web browsers are not; so the bets are off.
I drink to flexibility of design.
[overquotage snipped...]
Eh? Haven't you discovered windowing systems yet? No web page gets
to spread itself "all the way" across my monitor!!!
(Possibly they didn't reckon with you choosing a ridiculously wide
browser window /and/ using a browser that doesn't implement max-width)
Most people can comfortably read only 400 pixels across at a
That depends on the pixel density of the display! On my desktop
display, that's less than 3 inches, and represents a -very- short line
of text.
This is truly perverse. You want to take a badly-engineered product,
and use good engineering to mimic it? You'd rate to finish up with
many of the disadvantages of both, and few of the benefits. No wonder
you're disappointed.
Nobody claims that CSS is perfect, or that browser implementations of
it are entirely reliable. But at least it's a move in the right
direction, and, if done properly, my perception is that on balance it
rates to produce better results. Of course, it can be that your
standards of "better" are so different from mine that we'd never
agree. But you seem to be doing your worst to put CSS in a bad light,
while "proving" that table layouts enjoy a superiority that IMHO they
don't deserve.
More to the point, why is your perception of them so different from
mine?
The problem with table layouts is that they stubbornly insist on
"working" in situations where they're completely inappropriate.
CSS can be more flexible than that.
Which web browsers are not; so the bets are off.
I drink to flexibility of design.
M
Michael Winter
On 30/03/2005 19:47, c.thornquist wrote:
[snip]
I would imagine that it's simply because Web "designers" aren't using
CSS yet. The authors that do are the Web developers that know the
benefits of CSS, but don't have the artistic capability to exploit them.
Graphics designers are still being taught techniques from when NN4 was
a major user agent. I've even seen material that focuses on that
antiquated pain in the ass. CSS is a small side note, and the idea of
semantic mark-up never even comes up.
It's been said before that more graphical artists need to lead the way
with CSS-based Web development. To show others just what can be
achieved with well-written, semantic mark-up. I sincerely hope that
happens sometime soon.
[snip]
It's got nothing to do with numbers. It's that most table layouts I've
bothered to look at fit a particular design. If something doesn't
quite fit the design, or you need to change it, it's not always a
matter of a little editing here, at little there. That'll just lead to
something ugly and broken. It may necessitate rebuilding from the
ground up.
Mike
[snip]
I would imagine that it's simply because Web "designers" aren't using
CSS yet. The authors that do are the Web developers that know the
benefits of CSS, but don't have the artistic capability to exploit them.
Graphics designers are still being taught techniques from when NN4 was
a major user agent. I've even seen material that focuses on that
antiquated pain in the ass. CSS is a small side note, and the idea of
semantic mark-up never even comes up.
It's been said before that more graphical artists need to lead the way
with CSS-based Web development. To show others just what can be
achieved with well-written, semantic mark-up. I sincerely hope that
happens sometime soon.
[snip]
It's got nothing to do with numbers. It's that most table layouts I've
bothered to look at fit a particular design. If something doesn't
quite fit the design, or you need to change it, it's not always a
matter of a little editing here, at little there. That'll just lead to
something ugly and broken. It may necessitate rebuilding from the
ground up.
Mike
G
Greg Schmidt
This is an old question that's been rehashed here many times. The best
guess I've seen is that people who are good at CSS tend to be techies
and not so good at design(1), while people who are good at design tend
not to be so good at CSS. For a variety of reasons (mainly to do with
economics, I think), the two types tend not to collaborate very often.
Why do sites built with tables not stretch out to make better use of my
monitor? The pages which scrunch themselves all up into the left half
of the available space, and make themselves harder to read by doing so,
far outnumber the pages which will stretch too wide.
By fragile, I meant that they are more likely to break when changes are
made. You need to add a new menu item, and now all of the numbers must
be recalculated to fit it in. Such changes have much less "ripple
effect" on a properly designed CSS site.
(1) I know that this is true in my case. I think that perhaps my best
CSS design was for http://handsonmassage.ca/ It's not quite done yet,
but it's close. It's not as flashy as some sites, but I think it's not
as "boxy and boring" as many CSS sites. Most importantly, it meets the
client's needs, and it's dead easy to maintain (low maintenance costs
contribute to high customer satisfaction).
A
Adrienne
Recently, I was asked to duplicate the look of the Loreal site. The new
site owner thought that duplicating the site would be difficult, because it
was using ASP.Net so I would not be able to see the real coding.
I explained that I did not have to see the server side coding, only the
HTML. I looked at the source, and saw a whopping 1,121 lines, including
presentational tables, javascript, and 45 validation errors. When I
duplicated it, I reduced it to 164 lines, pure CSS, external javascript,
and 0 errors.
The sites are: http://www.loreal.com/ and
http://win04.startlogic.com/infinica/ (yes I know the text is too small,
but the site owner demanded it despite many warnings)
U
Uncle Pirate
Michael said:
That's it, I beleive. I know that I am no designer. So, in the
upcoming redesign of the large website I manage (http://alamo.nmsu.edu),
the design will be created by a committee consisting of people from our
(college) art department, marketing, public information, various area
personnel, and myself. We will each have something to offer in the
design, then I will implement what we come up with. I think it will
work rather well.
I can't wait to get rid of tables on my site. Updating pages with
tables nested in tables nested ... Well, you get the idea. Editing
information in a div or paragraph or whatever is much much easier.
I've also just implemented, for experimentation, SSI and am in the
process of implementing a new layout for one part of the site
(http://alamo.nmsu.edu/computer/) using seperate files for heading and
navigation menu, styles, footer, and main content. I have many
secretaries and other novices on campus that take care of various pages.
I think that if they only have to concern themselves with the content
section, they will have a much easier time messing things up less.
--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
Coordinator, Tularosa Basin Chapter, ABATE of NM; AMA#758681; COBB
'94 1500 Vulcan (now wrecked)
http://motorcyclefun.org/Dcp_2068c.jpgA zest for living must include a willingness to die. - R.A. Heinlein
U
Uncle Pirate
Good point. Some of my sites may be what Carla is talking about. I'll
have to consider placing everything in a div with a max-width. Of
course, that's not going to work in every browser, but at least I'll
have tried.
Nice looking site. I took a brief look at your coding and am wondering
why you went with the loose dtd. It appears (like I said, brief look)
that everything would validate strict. And I agree totally with you
about design vs. develop. I think I'm a pretty good developer; I'm not
so good at design.
--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
Coordinator, Tularosa Basin Chapter, ABATE of NM; AMA#758681; COBB
'94 1500 Vulcan (now wrecked)
http://motorcyclefun.org/Dcp_2068c.jpgA zest for living must include a willingness to die. - R.A. Heinlein