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A CSS board

Started by Alexandre P., November 13, 2003, 04:00:39 PM

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Alexandre P.

Hi,

Don't you think it could be interesting to have (how could I say it?) CSS-only powered design for SMF?  (of course, when SMF will be released ;) )  I mean, not to use tables to display the forums, the topics and the messages etc., but to use only divs, h1, h2, ... to display the board?  Since CSS are (supposed to be) more powerful and more accessible (to blind people, for example) than tables, I think making a CSS-powered design could be a very good idea...

As I'm not very good at making designs and since I'm not really good at coding, I'm launching the idea for anywho wants to do it...

@+

(PS: I really like the spellcheck function :) )
Aucun support par M.P., courriel ou messagerie instantanée / No support by P.M., email or I.M.

[Unknown]

Well, you could make a CSS only theme... problem is that CSS isn't perfect yet.

-[Unknown]

Tyris

atm CSS just isn't that good when you want things to be ordered -like- a table... like the board index etc... where you've got "board name, number of posts, latest posts" etc... if you want it ordered like that without any problems, tables are far superior to CSS... what CSS needs is like a single "row" kinda thingy... where you could define a single row of a table with varying widths... then just repeat them... would be very useful imho.

Tim

#3
That is a very very bad idea. Speaking from an accessability standpoint: the information displayed on a forum is data and belongs in a table. Not multiple tables, but one table.

It is possible, but it is a very very bad idea...

[edit]
The idea for tables is to display data, browsers for handicaped people have no problem with data tables, they will however mess up their users internet experience when tables are overused, like for lay-out reasons. You're better off accessability wise using a table to display the data that makes up the forum...

[Unknown]

Well, in theory templates should be able to just use divs and spans with id and/or class names.... then css would be able to "transform" those divs and spans into the wanted style.  The problem is this is only theory and not practice, and doesn't work for all purposes.

-[Unknown]

Joel

Tables should be used for tabular data -- information "where a logical relationship exists between data arranged in columns and rows" (source). Since forums generally fit this definition, tables should probably be used.

I'm a big proponent of both standards compliance and the separation of style and structure, and I believe many people misinterpret those ideas as meaning "tables are bad." This is not true at all. Tables have a specific purpose that cannot be matched by any other HTML tag.

With the template I'm working on for my site, I've managed to remove some tables and move all the table-related style (border, padding, etc.) to CSS. It's pretty site-specific (I completely removed some things that I won't be using on my site), but if there's a big demand for it I might make an as-XHTML1.0Strict-as-possible version of the default template when SMF 1 Final is release.

Spaceman-Spiff

reducing tables is good, but removing tables entirely and replacing with divs or spans only are not...

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