[Request, with example] Completely table-less theme

[Roman2K]

Hello,

The only bad point of SMF is that its theme and, as far as I know, all currently made themes, ALWAYS use tables and style="something" attributes that is I think the worse designing method.

Lately, I found Lussomo Vanilla [nofollow] PHP/MySQL forum. Here is how it looks by defaut :



You can see it working at the Vanilla community forum [nofollow].

As you can see, the theme is impressively clean and does not use any table nor style="something" attributes which is excellent.
The entire theme is totally "CSS driven" and is impressively beautiful.

• What do you think of this theme ?
  
• Is reproducing such a great theme for SMF possible ? If yes, is it easy ? (I have no experience in theming SMF)
  
• Is someone interested in creating the same theme for SMF ?
  

[Tristan Perry]

The theme doesn't work in IE4.. Although all CSS-designs can be great, it can be easier and a more viable method to use tables sometimes.

All CSS SMF themes are possible, although I think it'd be better if the default theme for SMF is kept as it is.

[tentronik]

All nice but 1 question "Why no tables"?
I think a template with like 3 tables (header, body and footer) and all directed by  css of course is best.

[Roman2K]

@tentronik
No table because it is not very modifiable though the CSS.

@Tau Online
I don't think there is a lot of people using the prehistoric IE4 .
Tables are great only for statistics, maybe.

Of course the default SMF theme can remain like this, the main goal of the post is to ask if someone would like to reproduce such a theme.

[Tristan Perry]

@Tau Online
I don't think there is a lot of people using the prehistoric IE4 .
Tables are great only for statistics, maybe.

Of course the default SMF theme can remain like this, the main goal of the post is to ask if someone would like to reproduce such a theme.

Sure, I understand that. As for the IE4 thing, true, although there are still people (I know of people using IE3..)

Tables aren't a bad thing, as you say, to display what they're designed for: displaying tabulated data. There will probably be themes in the future that are only CSS, shouldn't be long before it happens

[Roman2K]

There will probably be themes in the future that are only CSS, shouldn't be long before it happens

Good news !

For informations, in SMF 1.0.5 default theme :

• Number of tables :
  

  grep -Rin "<table>" .|wc -l
  11

• Number of style="something" attributes :
  

  grep -Rin -r "style\s*=" .|wc -l
  1024

[[Unknown]]

Many PDAs have the rendering capabilities of IE4.  So if something works in IE4, it's likely it works on most PDAs.  If it doesn't work in IE4, it's likely it doesn't work in many PDAs.

-[Unknown]

[Ritzle]

Do you mean that many people surf on forums with PDAs ?

[Roman2K]

Many PDAs have the rendering capabilities of IE4.  So if something works in IE4, it's likely it works on most PDAs.  If it doesn't work in IE4, it's likely it doesn't work in many PDAs.

-[Unknown]

I think we must not prevent us of enjoying the tableless+CSS webdesign of a forum juste because of IE4 browsers.

We should rather think about text-only browsers like lynx which cannot see table-based-designed websites correctly .

[Roman2K]

I think CSS discussion in this thread should continue here.

Thanks to jasidog's theme (Endar) I found a table-less SMF design : thank you jasidog!

[forsakenlad]

Can someone please explain why the use of tables are so bad?

[jasidog]

Thank you Roman.

I should point out though that Endar whilst it's largely what you say (Table less) may be very hard for people to do a lot of customisation on. The CSS is complex in places, messy too and not well commented.

Can someone please explain why the use of tables are so bad?

They are not bad. In short.

Though they should ideally not be used for anything but tabular data, what tabular data is is open to interpretation. However I would say that most modern message boards have a lot of data that is best semantically described in a table.

Most also tend to use tables in many places for pure layout where it often isn't necessary though.

[forsakenlad]

Thanks for the info jasidog...

Most also tend to use tables in many places for pure layout where it often isn't necessary though.

That is very reasonable

[JayBachatero]

Do you mean that many people surf on forums with PDAs ?

i think so.  im one of them.  i also use my psp to surf the web mostly forums.

[bloc]

There wil be CSS driven themes I reckon...but the right tool for the right job is essential.

Tables are good for forums, it doesn't need to look like a personal website - where artistic freedom on layout is more important. As for standards compliance, thats another story..but that don't automatically mean no use of tables and all css either.

[Roman2K]

@Bloc,
As jasidog said, tables should not be used for other things that tabular data and there is a lot of tabular data in forums, but in SMF default theme and in many other themes posted on this forum, the header elements of pages, for examples, are placed using tables that is not the right use for a table.

[tentronik]

Hmm sorry i still cant see why not use tables on index.php.
Either you go for a 70% - 100% align always filling the hall screen or % or it you use a constant width - mostly optimized for 800x600 or 1024x768 res.