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Old 11-03-2008, 01:43 PM  
sortie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NickPapageorgio View Post
It's also about accessibility, scalability, and the future of your site lol. The thing about SE not being able to crawl tables is a new one on me, so I won't chime in on that. Seems kinda dumb to assume that all of a sudden, after a decade or better or table designs, that SE for some reason won't get the info in them.

That being said, it DOES make a difference to onscreen readers. It DOES make a difference to how it's displayed on mobile devices.

Say I made a design, and the main layout of 1000 pages of content was put together in tables. Now, let's also assume that I'm not using some sort of CMS for the sake of argument. What's going to be easier on me in the future? To go through 1000 pages of html, changing out <tr>'s and <td>'s? Or changing a single file that says that div id "X" should display as "blablabla"?

I think that should be enough right there.

What it boils down to is this. If your client is happy with it and paid you...then fuck it. Mission accomplished.

BUT...lol...when said client 2 years from now says "Hey, you know what, I think I would rather have my headers look like so-and-so" you're gonna be kicking your own ass for putting all those tables in, unless ofcourse, you were smart and used <td class="blablabla"> ;)

There are a million pro and con arguments for or against css or tables. I prefer a mix of both and think really, it comes down to personal preference and client happiness.

> The thing about SE not being able to crawl tables is a new one on me

That's touted by idiots that confuse tables with frames/iframes.
When the search engine gets a frame/iframe it has to do a new http request to
get the actual source of the frame. Early search engines just didn't bother to do it;
maybe some still don't.


> Say I made a design, and the main layout of 1000 pages of content was put together in tables. Now, let's also assume that I'm not using some sort of CMS for the sake of argument. What's going to be easier on me in the future? To go through 1000 pages of html, changing out <tr>'s and <td>'s? Or changing a single file that says that div id "X" should display as "blablabla"?

Let's say you don't build sites like an amateur as stated above.
HTML templates can be inserted to cover all those pages just like any CSS.


Lets talk about resources.
CSS has to be pulled from a file on every page in order to do what you said(site wide update).
That's a additional server request for each page.
But you can skip that and write a simple script that uses a template to update all the
pages in one click but those pages don't need the extra CSS file request and thus
saves on a lot of server resources on a heavy traffic site.


There are plenty of pluses for using CSS; it's silly to argue otherwise; but to
argue that tables should be avoided at all cost is so stupid it's like witch hunting.
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