[Techtalk] Fixing up live.linuxchix.org

[Almut Behrens]

(Sorry, Yaroslav, for following up on list to a private reply.
I usually don't do this, but in this case, I couldn't see anything
'private' in the reply -- and maybe others might want to comment...)

On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 12:07:54PM +0300, Yaroslav Fedevych wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 10:38:11AM +0200, Almut Behrens wrote:
> > If it really is a subtantial problem for a significant portion of our
> > readers (not sure, how many have complained?), why not just use tables?
> > In this case it would most likely even work with the most ancient of
> > browsers.  Any reason to avoid tables, except that it's of course
> > fancier to use CSS layouting, these days...?
> > 
> 
> It comes very useful to not use tables for anything except tables
> if you want your page to bear some semantic, not only presentation. 

Although I generally agree it's preferable to seperate content from
layout, I think tables are actually somewhat borderline: for one, they
provide layouting hints, but OTOH they also provide limited sematic
markup, in the sense that everything in column 2, for example, will
typically somehow belong together content-wise...
Of course, there are many ways to misuse tables, but I think that, in
principle, they may also provide useful semantic structure -- though, a
row/column based indexing of content is not the most convenient one...

> Think parsing your pages with some kind of software tool -- here
> separating presentation from semantics is *very* handy.

Well, it's not exactly impossible to extract stuff from a table in an
automatic fashion :)

Almut