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What?!? Are you serious? Apparently the authors of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 still do not what the <table> element is actually for: displaying tabular data. NOT LAYOUT!!! There's this great thing called Cascading Style Sheets which, what do you know, allow you to specify the presentation of your web site, including layout! But I guess anything that's more involved than dropping in a single server control to do all the work for you is too hard.

If you don't know what I am talking about read this: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/.

Needed to vent. Thank you.

Don't make a hasty judgment. It's for layout as well. Thousands of websites are using them for this purpose. You needed to vent but it's not really necessary. For this very page what do you think they have used?

desKStar

Tables are not for layout. Period. This site does it wrong, too.

RTFM.

Hi hermitdruid,

A bit of a narrow minded vision, don't you think? Can you indicate what M you are referring to that we should R?

While I agree that it is generally better to use tables for tabular presentation and other CSS for design constructs, I don't agree with the "Tables are not for layout" statement. I also don't agree this site (and millions of others) do(es) it wrong. In the past few years, it gathered 52313 members that have made 153483 posts. How wrong is that? Sounds successful to me....

In my opinion, you're better off using CSS to design a site, and use tables for tabular data. However, there is no right or wrong. Instead of showing your (possibly??) limited vision and experience with this by telling people to R The F M, you should tell them *why* it's important to use CSS instead of tables. Tell them about reusability, cost of site wide changes, general maintainability, improved tools support and so on.

Also, tell them that table are perfectly acceptable in some cases, as long as you don't overuse them. IMO, there is not something wrong with using one simple table if it means you have instant cross browser compatibility, without spending literally days or weeks to tweak a "perfect" CSS design.

IMO, that is a lot closer to the truth than "Tables are not for layout" and RTFM are....

Cheers,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
Author of ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results and Beginning Dreamweaver MX / MX 2004
While typing this post, I was listening to: Day Of The Lords by Joy Division (Track 4 from the album: Heart And Soul (CD 1)) What's This?

Hi Imar,

Can't agree more. Rigidity in judgements is often a sign of narrow minded vision. And P2P forum is certainly not a place "to vent" in any case.

Well said, Imar! Those are all great reasons. While I went a little overboard in the initial post (Come on guys, I ADMITTED it was a rant! That entails that I knew it was partly irrational.) I mainly wanted to point out my disagreement with the authors' claim that tables were "ideal" for layout. It sounds like you would also agree that tables are not "ideal" for layout.

Keep up the great work! We're moving towards a better Web...

Yes, I do indeed agree with that. I just didn't agree with the RTFM so I had to rant about it.... ;)

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
Author of ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results and Beginning Dreamweaver MX / MX 2004
Want to be my colleague? Then check out this post.