[pmwiki-users] patch: tweaks to main wiki theme

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Sat Jul 23 04:46:23 CDT 2005


Ed W wrote:
> Yeah, sure, you could get rid of all the tables here from what I have 
> seen of peoples' CSS abilities.  However, it's easier for me (a css 
> novice) to work with a partial table site.

CSS instead of tables is sometimes a good idea, sometimes it isn't.

CSS layouts tend to be far more fragile than table layouts. The 
fragility has several sources; those that I already have consciously 
identified are:
* Browser incompatibilities. The worst offender is MS IE, but Mozilla 
has its share of, erm, unexpected behavior.
* A fragile model. To build a column at the left side, you set up a 
block element (e.g. an img or a div), then move it to the left and out 
of the normal layout stream. That's a hellishly indirect way to create a 
left column, you can't easily specify percentages for the column (well 
you can, but the specifications of several very far-away points in the 
source code must interact well - change it at one point, and you end up 
with distributing 170% of the horizontal space and wondering why there's 
no space left for a seemingly random column - until you notice that the 
column isn't so "random", it's the last one specified in the HTML 
source). You can't specify a background color for the left column: it 
ends with the box, the area below it logically belongs to the main 
layout. (You can do tricks with the <body> background, but that 
distributes the attributes of that leftmost column further across the 
HTML, and it doesn't solve the problem if you have more than two columns 
- again, you can layer things, but in the end, you have HTML code that's 
more complicated than the worst table layouts, is even more difficult to 
understand, and doesn't even work well in many browsers).

Regards,
Jo




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