Thumbnail gallery without tables?

[Max Quordlepleen]

Apologies for the crossposting, I wasn't sure which of these groups to
ask this in.

I have been lurking in these groups for a week or so, trying to glean
what I need to design a simple, clean set of pages that get the w3c
tick for XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS2. So far, I have succeeded, thanks
to the great information in these groups.

Now, however, I'm having trouble. A few days ago, I read a thread that
dealt with this issue of table-less thumbnails, and one example of an
approach that worked was
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
vertically in a single column. I am very pleased to have been able to
avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?

 

[Els]

Apologies for the crossposting, I wasn't sure which of these groups to
ask this in.

I have been lurking in these groups for a week or so, trying to glean
what I need to design a simple, clean set of pages that get the w3c
tick for XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS2. So far, I have succeeded, thanks
to the great information in these groups.

Now, however, I'm having trouble. A few days ago, I read a thread that
dealt with this issue of table-less thumbnails, and one example of an
approach that worked was
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
vertically in a single column.

Not in my IE6.0....

I am very pleased to have been able to
avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?

give them 'display:inline'. This way you can center them or
left align them, just like regular text.

 

[Lauri Raittila]

Apologies for the crossposting, I wasn't sure which of these groups to
ask this in.

I have been lurking in these groups for a week or so, trying to glean
what I need to design a simple, clean set of pages that get the w3c
tick for XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS2. So far, I have succeeded, thanks
to the great information in these groups.

Now, however, I'm having trouble. A few days ago, I read a thread that
dealt with this issue of table-less thumbnails, and one example of an
approach that worked was
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
vertically in a single column.

Could you specify which IE6 minor version? On what platform? IIRC have
tested on XP and 2000.

I am very pleased to have been able to
avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?

how about:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~atlas/kuvat/

Does it happen there too?

(special interest as I did both sites)

 

[Lauri Raittila]

Not in my IE6.0....


give them 'display:inline'. This way you can center them or
left align them, just like regular text.

Display:inline should not work as it does in IE, so it is useless when
you have captions.

but:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~laurirai/www/css/gallery/

Uses inline for IE and inline-table for Opera 6 and 7 and bugless
browsers. Tried to aply float:left for mozilla, but html*somthing bug is
fixed in gecko, and it don't work anymore.

Why they don't they fix bugs that do some real harm, instead of fixing
useful bugs? There has been no big CSS fixes since Mozilla 1.

 

[Max Quordlepleen]

Not in my IE6.0....

Now _that's_ weird. My HTML editor is set to invoke my default browser
(K-Meleon), and my IE6, so that I can see how pages look in both. When
I open this page in the editor, and invoke IE6, the thumbs are
vertically aligned. When I paste the URL into an already open IE6
address bar, they are properly aligned. Very strange. Sorry for
troubling you, and thanks for the prompt, helpful response.

 

[Els]

Display:inline should not work as it does in IE, so it is useless when
you have captions.

True, I wasn't thinking of captions, actually, just the thumbs.

but:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~laurirai/www/css/gallery/

Uses inline for IE and inline-table for Opera 6 and 7 and bugless
browsers. Tried to aply float:left for mozilla, but html*somthing bug is
fixed in gecko, and it don't work anymore.

The work of a webmaster/designer is never done...
All these manufacturers of browsers should really have a
maillist for webmasters, in which they tell exactly which
bugs they fix everytime they do... together with a
workaround if it was a useful bug ;-)

On a recent site I already resorted to little tables (two
cells) inside divs floating left. (where i didn't need it
centered)
That way I was able to define a height to the thumb and
caption together, so that when the caption is more than one
line, the divs don't start piling up at the end of the row.
Also it made it possible to have the horizontal thumbs not
top align with the vertical thumbs.

Why they don't they fix bugs that do some real harm, instead of fixing
useful bugs?

Maybe the useful bugs are just easier to fix

There has been no big CSS fixes since Mozilla 1.

Good, I haven't memorized all CSS rules and bugs yet. Let 'm
wait till I have ;-)

 

[Richard]

Could you specify which IE6 minor version? On what platform? IIRC have
tested on XP and 2000.

how about:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~atlas/kuvat/

Does it happen there too?

(special interest as I did both sites)

Good job too. Shows up in my IE 6 just fine. The sites show 3 across.
1024x768.

 

[Sid Ismail]

: and one example of an
: approach that worked was
: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
: renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
: rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
: vertically in a single column. I am very pleased to have been able to
: avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
: up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
: table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?


What in heaven's name is wrong with using tables for this application?
Especially if you have text captions under/above each image.

Tables is more universal than souped-up morse code.

Sid

 

[Els]

: and one example of an
: approach that worked was
: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
: renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
: rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
: vertically in a single column. I am very pleased to have been able to
: avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
: up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
: table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?

What in heaven's name is wrong with using tables for this application?
Especially if you have text captions under/above each image.

(lack of) flexibility

 

[Max Quordlepleen]

Could you specify which IE6 minor version? On what platform? IIRC
have tested on XP and 2000.


how about:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~atlas/kuvat/

Does it happen there too?

(special interest as I did both sites)

Sorry, Lauri, it must have been some snafu when I downloaded the pages
to dissect in my HTML editor. when I visit the pages using IE6, they
are just fine. My sincere apologies.

 

[Nik Coughin]

What in heaven's name is wrong with using tables for this application?
Especially if you have text captions under/above each image.

Tables is more universal than souped-up morse code.

Sid

Tables aren't the best or even the simplest way to do it.

Far from "souped-up morse code", a simple CSS thumbnail gallery would look
like this:

CSS:

..thumbnail{float: left;text-align: center;}

gallery:

<span class="thumbnail><img src="thumb1.gif" alt ="thumb 1" /><br />Caption
For Thumb 1</span>
<span class="thumbnail><img src="thumb2.gif" alt ="thumb 2" /><br />Caption
For Thumb 1</span>
etc.

That's a hell of a lot simpler than using tables. I should know, I
converted my table-based thumbnail gallery to a CSS-based one today.

Also, a table is going to be a fixed number of cells wide. This means that
your gallery is a fixed number of thumbs wide. The above will fit as many
thumbs as possible into the space available horizontally and wrap the rest
onto the next line. If you *want* it to be a fixed number of thumbs wide
then you wrap it in a div that only has room for that many thumbs.

If you want to apply styling to every thumb, you only have to add more
attributes to the CSS part.

CSS is a far superior way of doing thumbs than a table. That's what's wrong
with using tables for this application.

I don't agree with the argument that you shouldn't use tables for layout
because they are intended for tabular data. I think you shouldn't use
tables for layout because once you understand CSS it gives you much more
power, is much more flexible and is simpler to implement than a table. It's
simply a better way of doing things. You're limiting yourself if you use
tables.

 

[Andrew Urquhart]

: and one example of an
: approach that worked was
: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~egea/Photo_Gallery/Virpiniemi/. This page
: renders properly for me in my Gecko browsers, and iCapture shows it as
: rendering properly in Safari, but in IE6, the thumbnails are lined up
: vertically in a single column. I am very pleased to have been able to
: avoid using any tables at all so far, and would love to keep this
: up. May I ask for suggestions on how to achieve a plain, boring
: table-like gallery in CSS2, sans tables?


What in heaven's name is wrong with using tables for this application?
Especially if you have text captions under/above each image.

Tables is more universal than souped-up morse code.

Sid

With either method (tables or divs) there could be a loss of semantic
information depending on the implementation. For example if captions are a
seperate table row then the connection between the image and the caption may
not work very well for browsers rendering the content in non-visual ways,
although obviously the title attribute would help here.

As an alternate method I built a photo gallery as a collection of nested
lists, although it doesn't have explicit captions it might make more
semantic sense, but I'm still trying to decide:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrewu/photo/ [it's a bit big: 128KB of markup
alone]

 

[Els]

With either method (tables or divs) there could be a loss of semantic
information depending on the implementation. For example if captions are a
seperate table row then the connection between the image and the caption may
not work very well for browsers rendering the content in non-visual ways,
although obviously the title attribute would help here.

What about my mix of div's and tables here:
http://www.mediatech.nl/~rachel/Rachel/thumbswithcaptions.html
(don't click the links, or you'll go into the site I
borrowed the pics from ;-) )
Would it lose semantic information? It's completely
flexible, only left aligned, while I'd wish it to be
centered, but that's ok.

As an alternate method I built a photo gallery as a collection of nested
lists, although it doesn't have explicit captions it might make more
semantic sense, but I'm still trying to decide:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrewu/photo/ [it's a bit big: 128KB of markup
alone]

Looks very nice, but why did you put all these widths and
heights in? The heights are all equal, and the widths don't
matter, as far as I can see. And you are saying 128kb of
markup, well, that might have to do with the length of your
uri's :-D

 

[Els]

Tables aren't the best or even the simplest way to do it.

Far from "souped-up morse code", a simple CSS thumbnail gallery would look
like this:

CSS:

.thumbnail{float: left;text-align: center;}

gallery:

<span class="thumbnail><img src="thumb1.gif" alt ="thumb 1" /><br />Caption
For Thumb 1</span>
<span class="thumbnail><img src="thumb2.gif" alt ="thumb 2" /><br />Caption
For Thumb 1</span>
etc.

That's a hell of a lot simpler than using tables. I should know, I
converted my table-based thumbnail gallery to a CSS-based one today.

Just out of curiosity on the subject, could you give a url
to that gallery you just converted?

 

[Nik Coughin]

Just out of curiosity on the subject, could you give a url
to that gallery you just converted?

Harder said than done.

I have no ftp access to my site at the moment.

You can see the original table based gallery at:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/

Click screenshot test.

You won't be able to see any source though, as it is an xml document being
translated by xsl and the thumb gallery table itself is generated by
JavaScript dynamically within the xsl. If you don't use IE 6 then I doubt
very much that it will work -- not something that I'm proud of, but it was
made last year before I started writing proper cross browser pages and using
CSS.

However, if you want to see what the html source looks like, copy the code
below and paste it into notepad (or any other plain text editor), then save
it as tables.html and open it in your browser. Below that, I have included
my code for doing it with CSS. Notice that the table version is fixed
width, the CSS version scales to your browser window.

<html>
<head>
<title>Gallery with tables</title>
</head>
<body>
Thumbnails<br/><br/>
<table cellpadding="8" border="0">
<tr>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior0.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior0.gif" alt="0"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 1</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior1.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior1.gif" alt="1"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 2</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior2.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior2.gif" alt="2"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 3</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior3.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior3.gif" alt="3"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 4</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior4.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior4.gif" alt="4"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 5</a>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior5.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior5.gif" alt="5"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 6</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior6.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior6.gif" alt="6"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 7</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior7.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior7.gif" alt="7"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 8</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior8.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior8.gif" alt="8"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 9</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior9.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior9.gif" alt="9"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 10</a>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior10.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior10.gif"
alt="10" border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 11</a>
</center>
</td>
<td>
<center>
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior11.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior11.gif"
alt="11" border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 12</a>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>


<html>
<head>
<title>Gallery with CSS</title>
<style>.thumb{float:left;text-align:center;padding:8px;}</style>
</head>
<body>
Thumbnails<br/><br/>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior0.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior0.gif" alt="0"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 1</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior1.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior1.gif" alt="1"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 2</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior2.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior2.gif" alt="2"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 3</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior3.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior3.gif" alt="3"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 4</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior4.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior4.gif" alt="4"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 5</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior5.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior5.gif" alt="5"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 6</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior6.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior6.gif" alt="6"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 7</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior7.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior7.gif" alt="7"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 8</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior8.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior8.gif" alt="8"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 9</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior9.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior9.gif" alt="9"
border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 10</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior10.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior10.gif"
alt="10" border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 11</a>
</span>
<span class="thumb">
<a
href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/exterior11.gif"><img
src="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/Images/tn_exterior11.gif"
alt="11" border="0" align="bottom"/><br/>Caption 12</a>
</span>
</body>

 

[Nik Coughin]

Harder said than done.

Don't know where that came from. I meant easier said than done. Fool

 

[Andrew Urquhart]

What about my mix of div's and tables here:
http://www.mediatech.nl/~rachel/Rachel/thumbswithcaptions.html
(don't click the links, or you'll go into the site I
borrowed the pics from ;-) )
Would it lose semantic information? It's completely
flexible, only left aligned, while I'd wish it to be
centered, but that's ok.

Hmmn, in your implementation for each thumbnail image you've got a div
containing a 1 cell x 2 row table. I think it's unlikely that the caption
and image are ever going to get pulled apart from each other as they might
do in a multi-celled table, so it'd be quite difficult not to associate the
caption text with the image. That said, the table does actually seem
somewhat redundant to me.

Looking at the information you're representing in the page you have a
collection of images with caption data, there are no categories or
sub-categories in the gallery so you don't need any additional structural
markup to order and partition your thumbnails - the reason why I used
multiple lists of various types. The only thing you could do different
AFAICS is use a single list, but you wouldn't gain too much by doing that. A
list would allow a user to know how many items are in the gallery and to
jump from thumbnail to thumbnail without being forced to jump over the
captions as well, plus the user could more easily find the end of the list
and skip to any following content, but in your example there only is the
gallery and no other content, it would be hard to recommend implementing a
list in such a case.

As an alternate method I built a photo gallery as a collection of nested
lists, although it doesn't have explicit captions it might make more
semantic sense, but I'm still trying to decide:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrewu/photo/ [it's a bit big: 128KB of markup
alone]

Looks very nice, but why did you put all these widths and
heights in? The heights are all equal, and the widths don't
matter, as far as I can see.

If the browser knows the dimensions of the content (in this case the images)
during download it can in theory render and layout the page as it downloads
instead of having to wait for each image to download and then calculate the
image dimensions from the image file data and then re-draw the page. It's
also valid markup that way as well!

And you are saying 128kb of
markup, well, that might have to do with the length of your
uri's :-D

) I know! The reason that the URIs are written out in full is rather off
topic! It's because the page was actually created using a mirroring script
that I built (http://www.andrewu.co.uk/tools/mirroragent/mirroragent.zip
[9KB, zipped HTA]). That entire page is actually mirrored from
www.andrewu.co.uk/photo/ in an attempt to save that sites megre bandwidth!
The mirroring script changed the relative links in the original page during
the mirroring process so that the web page would work on a different domain,
it's just that I haven't gotten round to making it use relative URLs during
this process. So, that's why their absolutely referenced! )

 

[Craig]

Each div is float: left; with the same height and width.
http://www.amd-m.com/guys/

 

[Paul Furman]

reformatted for the slow among us:

Nik Coughin wrote:

..thumbnail {
float: left;
text-align: center;
}


<span class="thumbnail>
<img src="thumb1.gif" alt ="thumb 1" />
<br />
Caption For Thumb 1
</span>
<span class="thumbnail>
<img src="thumb2.gif" alt ="thumb 2" />
<br />
Caption For Thumb 2
</span>

 

[Steve R.]

Nik Coughin wrote in message ...

You can see the original table based gallery at:
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~nrkn/xml/

That page took forever to load on a dial-up, but I couldn't understand why.

Maybe tables *are* quicker :~)