On Sunday 07 May 2006 14:09, jdd wrote:
I don't see there is really problem with tables, but I don"t like the new layout
Everyone should heed this warning! I cannot stress enough the importance of leaving the design of an important and busy website to people who have *significant* web design experience. More harm than good will happen if people who obviously have no large or commercial website design experience continue to make arbitrary changes to the design of the opensuse website. The documentation page layout is now *broken*. The 'Other languages' box now renders *below* the page footer in Firefox and probably on other browsers too. Using tables for layout breaks accepted design principles for a few good reasons. Two of the most important reasons are as follows. (1) The way the page may be rendered in different browsers on different platforms is usually broken by the wrong and excessive use of table layouts. Visit the documentation page use the firefox view menu and go to 'Page Style' and then select 'No Style'. Now look at the way the page is rendered and scroll down the the table. See how most of the page scrolls sensibly in a top to bottom manner, and see how the table breaks this by spreading across the screen. Now imagine someone visiting this page in a PDA or other small screen device. Or imagine how messy this will not look in a text only browser. Using tables in this fashion breaks the design of a page for multiple platforms. There are CSS stylesheet attributes to facilitate these platforms and using tables for layout breaks this. (2) Screen readers and other accessibility technologies get confused by table layouts. This is probably the most important reason to *never* use tables for layout design. Screen readers may incorrectly read back to the user information that's not properly presented in tables. What is worse is the screen reader may not even read any of the information to the user if the tables are nested. Screen readers expect tables to contain tabular data, which not surprisingly is what tables are meant and designed to be used for, not layout designs.