Paying the price of tables
Posted in Tech/Development on: Thursday, May 18, 2006 by Paul Boag
Barely a week goes by that I fail to rant about why we should banish table based design and yet here I sit struggling because I failed to heed my own advice.
I am working on an old website that I built a couple of years ago and I am having a hell of a time with it, all because of my own laziness.
I would like to tell you that I built this site before I knew about web standards and the concept of separating design from layout. I would like to blame the presence of a table to set the basic layout as a mistake born out of ignorance. I would like to tell you that… but I can’t.
I introduced one tiny little table. So small you could argue it hardly counted.
When I built this site I knew exactly what I was doing. We had been working with standards for well over a year and I had a fairly good handle on what I was doing. However for one reason or another I cut a corner. I introduced one tiny little table. So small you could argue it hardly counted. All this table did was set the basic two column layout. I argued that the time saved from taking this approach out weighed any "purist" arguments I might have against it. And indeed it did make life a lot easier and we turned the project around remarkably quickly considering its size.
Of course, like all good shortcuts it eventually came back to bite me. Recently the client requested a low vision version of the site like the one we offer on our company website. The problem is that one of the basic principles of low vision design is that content is sorted into a single column to aid readability by those with poor eyesight. Suddenly that little insignificant table has become a real pain.
The morale of the story is two fold, dump those table based designs and don’t cut corners for a quick win.
11 Comments
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Hind sight is 20/20….
or
Website is 20/20?
There is a huge debate about tables on sitepoint right now, plenty of people simply don’t care about the pitfals of tables and claim the benifits of CSS are miniscule.
In an industry with so many designers, I figured people would seak out any edge they could. Odd that so many people still rely on tables.
See… Tables are like your ex-wife. You loved them once and didn’t think you could live without them. And even though you’ve now moved on to something better, you still have to pay alimony and will never be enitrely free of them.
I came onto the web standards scene a little too late, and I have a lot of table-based layouts I’m having to maintain weekly.
Many times, I just want to do myself a favor and recode entire sites for my own peace of mind (but I can’t do that kind of work for free.)
Could you use a bit of DOM Scripting to remove the table?
That is exactly what I have done ed but its not ideal for those without javascript enabled.
True, but at least it is a start!
Maybe there is some server side processing you could do to strip the table out before it even gets to the browser.
Id could all end up being a bit slow though. Is it time to redesign the site?
What about a bit of text replacement? I’ve always found Dreamweaver’s text tools good for a mass update across a site.
Replace first table cell with a , replace the second one, then the replace the tag with a container and style up your CSS accordingly.
(working on a copy first of course!)
I’ve made it sound so simple but I’m sure you’ll say it’s not.
Unfortunately Andrew, text replacement isnt the answer. The low vision version of the site uses exactly the same HTML as the main version. All you do is swap the stylesheet. If I removed the table from the HTML it would break the main stylesheet.
This problem has bitten me several times (including my personal sites). Now that I am completely table free, I have seriously considered updating all my previous clients with a tableless design at a super discounted rate. Has anyone done that, is it necessary, or am I just to much a ‘purist’ now?
Tables are great
It seems like tables are faster and more consistant between different browsers then absolute positioning. I see nothing wrong it may not be considered proper and may not be its true purpose [as the thing holding the layout together] but it works better then the proper way.