In a perfect world...
You have a Graphics Designer that works well and can communicate well with the Web Designer.(does that happen?)
As a team they work together Optimizing the Design and the Code, give and take until they have something that looks good, usable and easy to update.

Usually that doesn't happen. The Graphic Designer and the "Code Geek" can't get along...and great ideas are lost in translation. When you have a guy doing both you're usually missing out on key things in both areas.

Your a fucking chode. There is absolutely no reason what so ever to use tables for layout, do you understand that? Tables are for tabular data and should NOT be used for presentation. HTML, and XHTML is not for your presentation, it is for markup. Idiots like you have to fuck it up for the rest of us.

Your clients may not require table-less design's but they deserve them. You should want to deliver top quality work instead of some cluttered bullshit your probably overcharging for. If your not going to embrace web-standards and don't want to fuck your clients why don't you have someone that understands xhtml / css well enough to properly slice your designs instead of pumping out garbage that some poor bastard like me is going to have the displeasure of working with down the road.

Lollerskates!!

Ya done any tours lately that are 100% tableless?
Lets see em dorko. Impress us.

OK now shut up, cuz you aint got none...

I'm sorry, what? I'm not the one using one big sliced up image for my sites.

It looks like you just ran out of arguments, went buck wild and now you're throwing out random insults to everyone in this thread.

No, i write more complex code then tours. I'm usually hired for billing systems, affiliate tracking, custom stuff, stuff that you couldn't begin to comprehend all the details and layers of complexity.

I do plenty of table-less pages, i'll be damned if i go posting my mainstream clients sites on gfy of all places. I'm telling you honestly that if you took the time to learn css properly instead of fiddle fucking with your bloated table based crap, you would understand why i'm saying what i'm saying.

Tours of all places should be table-less, There is absolutely no limit to positioning with css, so you even suggesting they should be table based is absurd. If any page should be optimized for search engines and fast loading, containing as little markup as possible while still being as attractive as you want it to be, it should be a tour page.

You make tours based with tables because you can't properly do it with css. That's your fault, not css's, don't go spouting off how tables are better when their not.

Program Owners: Any tour page composed of a bunch of tables should be rejected. Make table-less a base requirement, you will thank me later. It is absolutely no harder to lay one out using tables than it is css, and anyone that tells you otherwise probably shouldn't be hired. You want fast loading, se optimized, pretty tours, demand css and no tables for any data that isn't tabular.

I disagree that tables are better than tableless ... I think the benefits of tableless design outweighs the argument ... that said ... everyone is different and in all honesty, if you design your sites efficiently, I guess tables is ok ...

I'm no expert on judging other designs tho... so I stay out of that part :)

Tableless layouts are more compatible with braile readers.

more replies? LOL

finally some good drama!

Alien, I really don't care about all the hate and stuff, but if you use png you really should use css (I don't even say tableless, just CSS) so IE can show the site as intended. See below:

http://fdsign.com/capture/ialien.jpg

as you may see, IE isn't redering the transparency and it renders colors a little different (+/-2% gamma deviation by default)

btw, for the record, I consider you a designer (a stubborn one, but designer anyway) and even tho is not my kind of style, I love that 3D machinery you did on your site, really neat :)
I told you before, you're talented, but a tad too much into drama, just do your stuff and let people say whatever they want

Peace out :)

btw, if you want help on that png transparency fix, hit me up on ICQ or send me a mail using the form on my site and you can have it solved in 1 min :)

Ahh so you are a programmer and all that shit...
AHha...

Yeah. OK. So like you know why tours are coded the way they are these days and how well the industry has optimised Tours to be SEO optimised vs lacking design elements. You do realise that SEO and adult tours is kinda uhmmm not really a priority? Do you know why?

I can see that SEO on tours could help but I do not see why tableless design is absolute necessary. Who is to say that Table based design is all so much batter for SE? the information is still read in the text. Calling tablated data to a SE vs. non-tabulated is like comparing an apple to an apple. It's a very very minute difference.

But hey lets get into practical coding now! Thats going to be fun. You use PHP to make SEO pages? Ya use a Database? Sure do don't ya? Now that information within the database is not really going to show in SE's is it?

But don't take my word for it! Lets see what the experts say!

"PHP Search Engine Optimization
(Page 1 of 4 )

You want to convince search engine spiders to crawl your pages frequently. You need to put in keyword-rich, dynamic content to help convince the spiders to check your pages regularly. Unfortunately, many spiders trip over dynamic pages. How do you fix this problem? Use PHP to give your dynamic pages static-looking URLs. Roger Stringer explains how to do it.
PHP is a useful language, used by many all over the Web. But it has one failing. By its nature, it is not search engine friendly. In fact, it's the exact opposite. But with some clever tweaking, we can make PHP a powerful tool in the quest for search engine dominance."

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-En...-Optimization/

From other sources regarding Tabulated and non tabulated data.

"The idea behind SEO is that spiders will typically only crawl up to a certain kilobyte of data. Usually crawl from the top down. The more data, or in this case table tags, potentially the less content a spider can crawl, especially for longer pages."

So ultimatly what the conclusion here is simple...
Adult content which is mainly photos/video has very little necessisty for tabulated or non tabulated design infact it will make ZERO difference, and should a SE Spider come in to a tour or free site the Crawl of the spider is seldomly going to be limited by the content displayed on the free site or tour. Unless of course it is a monster site.

So the end all is again that base static pages are the best bet for SEO concerns, utilizing tables or no tables make very little difference.

SO why is Tableless SO necessary?
Its just best for SEO as the informaion can before being limited to the SE spiders capacity to index the page.

Here is fun a story:)

I have a little story to tell about the webmaster who used a table with DIVs and the webmaster who didn't. The webmaster who didn't use a table had the higher paying job, a big house, a nice car, and a hot wife because he got all the good jobs for his tableless designs. The webmaster who used tables only to insert his DIVs was considered a second-rate bum and many believed he didn't even know how to position his DIVs. He made very little money. He lived in a rundown apartment. He had no car, and he had no wife.

Then oneday the webmaster who had a classy job and the ever-so-popular tableless designs one day was sitting at his desk smoking a cigar talking on his cell phone about where to meet his buddies for lunch when his boss came running in all excited and out of breath.

"We just got a whole bunch of affiliate partners that want to place ads on our pages so they can make money and we can make commissions! We want an entire column added to the right side of every page!"

Now the site had been around for several years and there were thousands of pages of content to add this column to, and the pages were all written in DIVs. So, the webmaster gasped and dropped his phone as the cigar fell from his mouth and he said, "Well, that is going to take some time, I got to place new DIV tags on every page to add one column of ads and that is no easy task!"

The boss lamented this news, because not only would that mean he would not be making money off of his affiliates until the job was done, but he would have to hire someone else to assist the webmaster with his work until the site was updated. So, trying to save some money and not wanting to take a lot of time to hire someone on a contract, he hired the poor unsuccessful webmaster who always used tables to position his DIVs.

The poor and destitude webmaster reluctantly decided he had no choice but to accept the tedious task, because he needed the money. So, for nearly a month he labored on inserting the appropriate DIVs on each page, copying and pasting many times into each page. When it was all said and done he went to the boss, and he shook his head and said, "You know it took a lot of copying and pasting to insert all them new DIV tags...If the site had been designed with a table I would have only had to copy and paste once into each page to insert the new column. You would have made a lot more money instead of having to hire someone else on, and it would have saved me from a lot of headaches going vertigo looking at code. I hope you never have to add a column again, for your sake and mine."

The boss shook his head, and stopped the man before he could go. "Wait!" he said. "I could have been making tens of thousands of dollars a day all this time if you had done my site with tables?"

The tired and frustrated impoverished webmaster nodded with a grim expression, and the boss threw up his hands and rolled his eyes. Racing out of his office, he motioned for the poor webmaster to follow after him as he charged into the rich webmaster's office. The rich webmaster was polishing his W3C Validation pin on his suit jacket as they entered and he smiled saying, "So, did the columns get added to all the pages?"

"Yes!" shouted the boss, "but you're fired! I got me a new webmaster right here who is going to make sure I never lose money adding a column of ads again!"

Now, the poor webmaster is no longer poor, and the rich webmaster is no longer rich. He lost his big house. He lost his nice car. He lost his hot wife, because she only loved him for his money, and he is in the psyche ward for going nuts and breaking computers at a department store.

Uhmm thats funny I am using IE. And my layout is not doing that white thing at all.
Are you confused?

rowspan and colspan are the worst possible attributes you could ever use in a design.
Good luck changing it later.

This proves you don't know anything about html, php or css.

After that comment there's no denying it.

Call me all the names you want.

sorry, it's IE6 and below, they added it in IE7. Here you can see Microsoft's IE developer admitting it. And here you can see how around 27% of surfers are seeing the same behavior, so be careful with PNGs, esp if you're using them on clients designs

Of that 27% how many of them are adult webmasters?:1orglaugh
Just a note I have not yet ever built a tour with PNG's:) It's been tempting but the time is not right yet.

I'm not even gonna quote your little rant. Table-less designs are better for search engines because there is less markup convulating the text. Obviously you have no idea on anything even remotely technical or you'd know that by the time the search engine see's shit pulled from databases by php it's as text content on the page anyway. You don't have to have dynamic url's like ?blah=foo&bar=neek to use a database and php, mod_rewrite can and does (and i use it to, on a daily basis), rewrite those to more friendly search engine urls. Even if it didn't, search engines treat pages with query strings pretty well now a days, they adapted, like everyones telling you you should.

If you want to fix that fucked up png issue in ie, upload this .htc file somewhere and import it into your stylesheet with the following rule:

http://www.scriptworkz.com/css/iepngfix.htc

css rule:

img, div { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc) } (if you just want it inplace on img tags and divs, * also works)

the big red impact post indicates a meltdown is nearby

You are so eager to use png's as it's the better method yet not css, kind of ironic.

tables = spreadsheets
layouts = layers.

You use layers in photoshop to move and adjust individual elements as you see fit and yet you see no benefit to doing the exact same thing with a web page.

Learn CSS properly and then return to tell us how tables are better, otherwise you are simply sounded very uneducated on the matter and for a designer, that's not good.

Now more for the read:

The main problem with tableless design is the wide differences that are to be found in browser support. There are considerable differences in implementing a CSS layout for multiple browsers due to bugs and mis-interpretation of the standards by different browser developers. These necessitate a large number of complex hacks and workarounds in the CSS files, and Web pages need to be tested much more carefully on a wider variety of devices than with table-based design, as some of these bugs can render the content illegible on some browsers.

In addition, CSS support in some older browsers such as Netscape 4 is very incomplete, which can cause major problems if these browsers also need to be targeted.

Conversion to tableless web design has been slow also because of table to layer/css conversion software. HTML editors such as Adobe Dreamweaver can convert tables to layers back and forth. Though this would ease the conversion a little, complications exist in the exactness of the conversion. The centering of tables centers them on the page, but the centering of layers together on different screen resolutions requires some tinkering.

Just as different browsers may interpret tableless design differently, different web designers implement tableless design with varying methods and degrees of skill. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult to read tableless code as compared to a web page with good use of tables which follow a well defined set of rules.

If a web designer has positioned block elements on a web page using the "float" attribute it isn't always clear how these elements are positioned and what parts of the related CSS file should be edited if adjustments are needed. Adjustments are often needed to widths of block elements in tableless design as browser support is not yet reliable.

Positioning an element on a web page using the "float" attribute encourages the browser to render many pages unintelligible if an error occurs because "float" gives the browser permission to reorganise the web pages by pushing page elements downwards rather than making user friendly adjustments.

There are clear benefits to removing or reducing the use of excess tables on web pages but as a consequence, many web designers are avoiding the use of tables completely. While tables are frowned at in the web design community, they are often the best tool for certain layouts. Often tableless design can offer no benefit at all but require many extra hours of work during website production and maintenance.


[edit] Alternatives
There are clear advantages to centralizing document mark-up across one or two CSS files. Global edits and simple adjustments are simplified this way. However with the advent of server side languages like PHP and ASP it became possible to centralize CSS and HTML with include files.

Nowadays, most high quality web applications use a presentation layer or templating system which applies HTML and CSS to the application logic in a simple fashion rather than duplicating mark-up language throughout many files in a website.

Web applications using a presentation layers have their CSS files applied to a few HTML documents.


[edit] The use of tables
Because of the term "tableless web design", some have interpreted this design strategy as an unconditional repudiation of all tables in web design. This has caused some to avoid tables even when tables are appropriate. Using divisions to simulate a table for the display of tabular data is as much a design flaw as using tables to simulate a division. Some sources clarify this distinction by using the more specific term "tableless web layout".[1]

Additionally, one distinction is sometimes missed: using tables in web design does not necessarily equate to using the table element (and related elements) defined in HTML 4.0. Although the table element is by far the most common means of specifying tables in web design (both for "layout" and "tabular data") CSS also specifies a "table model" which allows the semantics of "tabular representation" to be applied using other elements as well.[2] One reason this distinction is sometimes overlooked is because of the lack of support for the CSS table model in Internet Explorer.


I know many of you attempt to sell clients on tableless design and the fact is you are doing them a diservice. Cross browser compatibility is incredibly limited especially when concerning older browsers. FDesign I like your stuff but selling tableless design may not be such a good idea for clients, especially tours. I do not know why you would clown my use of a stupid PNG when you yourself have far more issues regarding layout control and cross browser problems using tableless design.

and yet... they worked perfectly fine for years and years... and nobody ever complained..
til something else came along.

Fuck tables.
Fuck divs.

1 big image. 1 image map. DONE! :)

Ya go ahead and keep going on Tableless. Thats fine with me:)
However doing so right now is still problematic in browser interpretations of Layered documents. You are fucking yourself going tableless right now.

I got my tableless design in my BLog I am figuring out where tableless really can be applied but its not the end all be all. Especially right now.

Oh they complained. I did every time a designer brought me a design with colspan and colwows.

Images are meant to be broken into cells if you are going to use tables. this way you can make minor adjustments, even rearrange things.

With colspan and colrow, you can't change anything... ever.

Hardly. But keep sounding uneducated all you like.
You're supposed to be the inventor, leading edge.
Falling behind seems to be more your strong suit.

this thread rocks

UR DUM. Go somewhere where you can be appreciated.
Like the local Asylum.

you're right...
i've only been working with tours for 12 years..
never once had to update one of them.

BULLSHIT!: A careful developer can create a css masterpiece that renders fine across browsers using one simple conditional comment. Testing isn't that hard if your not a chode.

Even dreamweaver, etc.. can spit out valid xhtml / css table-less slices if configured properly, once again, because you don't understand margins, or how to position things properly doesn't make you right that it's hard or can't be done, positioning in css is a hell of a lot easie then with tables i you know what your doing, and using percentages and em's it will be fluid across differant window sizes and resolutions.

BULLSHIT AGAIN: floating works fine across browsers reliably if you aren't a jackass and understand how floating works, i've done it hundreds of times. There are NO BENEFITS to keeping tables, your only increasing code bloat, complexity, maintenance / upgrade complexity.

Developing websites without tables, using semantic markup speeds up development if your not a chode like alienq.

I'm not even gonna break this shit down. Anyone telling you to use tables and not utilize webstandards is screwing you. Web standards are good for business and it's been proven many times over by people not nearly as insane as alienq. There is absolutely no way someone selling you on web-standards and advocating them is doing any sort of disservice, they are thinking of your business and how to create your site the right way.

I really hope no one buys into your bullshit, your doing everyone a huge disservice by convincing anyone that can't see through your bullshit that table based crap is better for them, just because your not skilled enough to properly use css / proper markup.

take a look at http://www.csszengarden.com/ and see what i'm talking about, this shit wouldn't be possible with tables, they're just switching a stylesheet, the markup doesn't change because their using markup properly and not for presentation, so blow some more smoke up peoples ass about how tables are easier to maintain / change, suck off, whatever.

:1orglaugh

Now you sound educated.... 4th grade level. :glugglug

Nah I think everyone should go tableless design. Because once the clients start getting complaints from traffic or something drops off website and emails roll in that things look funny on the website they can come to me.

Then I will say I can definatly help you, ya shouldnt listen to little spinner kids that learned cut and paste layer code and CSS who basically conned you into believing state of the art is in flawed design!

OH by the way I am cheaper than them spinner kids to so today is your lucky day!
From then on I have a new client for life that values my opinion:)
Believe me this has happened in my business more than once!

You've never updated your tours in 12 years.
And this is a good thing?

This thread makes my head hurt.
I think I'll step out and talk to some adults again.

Best of luck with your 12 year old table filled designs guys. :glugglug

This is the biggest crock of bullshit propaganda i've ever heard. Your a fucking idiot man, table-less design is there, why do you think everyone (even the big names) are doing their sites using web standards, proper markup, and css, maybe because browser support is here, it's fucking here now, unless your a fossil of a chode that's hung up on your bad coding habits.

Both Bruce Leroy and the Shogun of Harlem / Sho'Nuff!!! disapprove of your image map skills :(

On a side note, AlienQ reminds me of the fortune cookie computer.

Well.. See... What you tableless keyboard warriors are forgetting is that tours always change, why would a tableless design be so much better?

Ultimatly tours get a complete rehaul every 5-6 months or yearly. So whats the purpose again in template driven dynamic CSS on a tour? Or for that matter any website? Unless of course its a major portal like google where you can pretty much deduce on its appearance looks like shit? Sure its the number one site and it's information rich but it lacks presentation largely because it does not need it!

I think i was wrong previously, this is the biggest crock of bullshit i've ever seen. If your site is coded properly, using web standards and proper markup / css, it will only help. The search engines will love you more, and when your tour loads and renders twice as fast your surfers will love you more. There is no flaw here, the only flaw this fucking moron see's is the fact he can't figure it out and he feels threatened now that everyone is pointing out his whole process is dated and obsolete.

Tables are one of the biggest accessibility fuck-ups of all times, so i love how you keep spouting off how their more accessible / reliable. I hope no one buys into your bullshit and when it comes time to get design they go somewhere that has clue.

SO how about you guys try and tell me now that Adult sites and tours need no presentation:)

Look at that css zen garden site i posted man. That's the benefit right there, one stylesheet, same markup, completely differant fucking site. It's clean, semantic markup, so it's machine readable (se spiders), and ALL the presentation is in one file.

I'm really not even trying to flame you or start drama, it just ircks me that your spouting off all this crap that's completely inaccurate and your feeding everyone disinformation.

CSS / XHTML is the here and now, get with it or fall behind. Your same lame arguments over and over again have one major flaw: THEY ARE BULLSHIT.