Comments on: HTML tables and exploratory programming

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:57:50 +0000

I think Paul didn’t mean to say that everything should be a list. As I understand it, he values them as a great tool for sketching.

By: Robert Goldman

Robert Goldman — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:50:55 +0000

I have to tell you this is one Lisp programmer who won’t agree with this.

I have been working on a very large codebase where everything was represented as a list. It’s a huge pain! After a while, I just dug in and started defining structures of (:type list) so that I could rip out all the calls to car, cadr, etc. and start saying things like (var-binding ) and (tree-children ) instead.

Later, when I figured out which were the most often-referenced structures, I started redefining these structures as normal structures, not list structures.

If Paul’s opinion extends from lists to structures implemented as lists, I’d be more inclined to agree with him…

By: Leslie

Leslie — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:59:07 +0000

I should have added “fluid columns”. Of course, doing it all float-left is easy with fixed widths. But I have never seen a fluid layout with more than three columns in CSS.

Leslie

By: dan

dan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:09:56 +0000

.
.
.

div {
float:left;
width:200px;
}

all the collumns you need.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:18:51 +0000

I suppose you can also nest DIVs to achieve a column layout with more than three columns. But this gets ugly, obviously.

As for why he didn’t propose to use DIVs, I can only guess. Tables are much easier to layout in a grid, perhaps that’s why :)

By: Aankhen

Aankhen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:39:08 +0000

“And yes, CSS still can’t do more than three columns, and even for three I would have to look it up.”

It can, actually. If all you want to do is duplicate the look of a table, CSS2 specifies `table’ and related values for the `display’ property. The problem is that the major browser (read: IE) doesn’t support it. CSS3, on the other hand, specifies proper multi-column layouts.

As for the relevant quoted section of the article, I really can’t agree with his reasoning. If the programmer is so unsure of what (s)he’s doing, why not use a bunch of `div’ and `span’ elements rather than abusing `table’? Those elements are meant to be completely semantically meaningless, yet have hooks (`class’ and `id’, to be precise) for attaching behaviour (JavaScript) or styling (CSS) through which you can later refine your design. In fact, using `table’ elements forces you to think in grids, whereas `div’ and `span’ elements let you create free-form designs.

Forgive me if this is going offtopic. I just found his logic rather irritating. :-P