Web Style Guide

[Grok]

By some accounts, the best web style guide made:
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html

Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites by Patrick Lynch (Yale Press, 1999; ISBN 0-300-07675-4). This is the print version of one of the best online Web design guides I've seen. If I could recommend just one book to Web site designers, this would be it (Nielsen's Usability Engineering would be an excellent companion). It provides the philosophy and rules of thumb for effective Web page and site design. It's highly readable, despite the style guide title. The Web version is at http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html, but it's much faster to read it on paper than on the Web, and the pictures are better, too.

[quasi-modo]

I am not too into tables for layout. It talks about css in there but I saw it talking about tables too and I really believe people should move away from tables more because there are so many advantages to using css. But that is for another thread and another day.

[Grok]

I am not too into tables for layout. It talks about css in there but I saw it talking about tables too and I really believe people should move away from tables more because there are so many advantages to using css. But that is for another thread and another day.

You've got this table fixation you should get over.  CSS is decorative markup.  Tables are structural markup HTML elements.  They are not competing concepts.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

But tables are abused as such!

[quasi-modo]

Tables are neccessary for some things, but layout is not what they are neccessary for. Tabels are great for tabular data, a data bound grid for example. But css for layout is much more efficient and css was designed for layout. But like I said this is for another thread and I did not want to go into a huge debate. Basically how I see it is tables are misused for layout especially when people start nesting them left and right, css was designed for layouts so it will work better for one.
EDIT: I am not saying that if you use tables for layout you are going to die or anything, but for new webdevelopers it is probably better for them not to start down the path of tables for layouts. HTML 4.01 strict assumes you are using css for layout, html for content. That is why attributes like align, valign, height, etc were depreciated.

[Grok]

Tables are neccessary for some things, but layout is not what they are neccessary for. Tabels are great for tabular data, a data bound grid for example. But css for layout is much more efficient and css was designed for layout. But like I said this is for another thread and I did not want to go into a huge debate. Basically how I see it is tables are misused for layout especially when people start nesting them left and right, css was designed for layouts so it will work better for one.
EDIT: I am not saying that if you use tables for layout you are going to die or anything, but for new webdevelopers it is probably better for them not to start down the path of tables for layouts. HTML 4.01 strict assumes you are using css for layout, html for content. That is why attributes like align, valign, height, etc were depreciated.

OK that's fair.  Look at vL main page though.  Its layout is done by tables.  The middle section has 3 columns, "navigation", "news articles", and "headlines".  Show me how we can accomplish that with CSS?

[Kp]

HTML 4.01 strict assumes you are using css for layout, html for content. That is why attributes like align, valign, height, etc were depreciated.

hmm, I thought those got depracated in preference to you specifying that kind of information in a CSS, so that it would uniformly apply to all your tables?

[WinSocks]

you can do layering and css structures. I've seen it done on a site before. But it wasn't very good.

[Spht]

you can do layering and css structures. I've seen it done on a site before. But it wasn't very good.

Not everyone runs their browser in full screen or uses >1024x768 resolution, you know (fix your signature image).

[Tuberload]

you can do layering and css structures. I've seen it done on a site before. But it wasn't very good.

Not everyone runs their browser in full screen or uses >1024x768 resolution, you know (fix your signature image).

I use 1024x768 resolution, have the browser in full screen and that image is still to big.

[quasi-modo]

OK that's fair.  Look at vL main page though.  Its layout is done by tables.  The middle section has 3 columns, "navigation", "news articles", and "headlines".  Show me how we can accomplish that with CSS?

sure, why not, http://bluerobot.com/web/layouts/layout3.html look at this, it is all of the different box layouts you could ever want http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/boxes.html . Those are two examples that I just like to give out. My new layout uses two columns, I dropped the owen hack btw because I coded some things differently and found a work around that meant I did not need it, but I still have box model hacks for ie5. http://www.quasi-ke.servebeer.com/layout/index.aspx It looks a little messy still but that is because there is no content on it.

[quasi-modo]

hmm, I thought those got depracated in preference to you specifying that kind of information in a CSS, so that it would uniformly apply to all your tables?

From what i have heard it was depreciated because of the css yes, because tables were not designed for this and css was. Many of the html elements for alignment and coloring and even the border attribute were all depreciated http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes.html that is a list of all attributes and you can see which are depreciated. CSS does it much better so it is used.

[Grok]

Please stop saying depreciated

[quasi-modo]

I was going to make some corny rhyme with appreciate but decided not to... it just would have killed itself.

[Adron]

OK that's fair.  Look at vL main page though.  Its layout is done by tables.  The middle section has 3 columns, "navigation", "news articles", and "headlines".  Show me how we can accomplish that with CSS?

sure, why not, http://bluerobot.com/web/layouts/layout3.html look at this, it is all of the different box layouts you could ever want http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/boxes.html . Those are two examples that I just like to give out. My new layout uses two columns, I dropped the owen hack btw because I coded some things differently and found a work around that meant I did not need it, but I still have box model hacks for ie5. http://www.quasi-ke.servebeer.com/layout/index.aspx It looks a little messy still but that is because there is no content on it.

All those three-column layouts look awful at less than 800x600. The outermost table columns overlap instead of shrinking proportionally. Fix that so it works just like html tables?