• Post Reply Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums
this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ...
Marshals:
  • Campbell Ritchie
  • Jeanne Boyarsky
  • Ron McLeod
  • Paul Clapham
  • Liutauras Vilda
Sheriffs:
  • paul wheaton
  • Rob Spoor
  • Devaka Cooray
Saloon Keepers:
  • Stephan van Hulst
  • Tim Holloway
  • Carey Brown
  • Frits Walraven
  • Tim Moores
Bartenders:
  • Mikalai Zaikin

?s for Elliotte Rusty Harold: tableless design and browser support

 
Greenhorn
Posts: 2
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Greets,

having not read your book, i have a few questions.

1. Would you argue in favor of tableless design?

2. At what point do you stop supporting browsers?

3. How do you get design/creative/content groups to appreciate the need to refactor? Working in a part of large group supporting a huge and now very outdated website, i'm finding this to be very challenging.

-
James
[ July 15, 2008: Message edited by: james napoli ]
 
Sheriff
Posts: 67746
173
Mac Mac OS X IntelliJ IDE jQuery TypeScript Java iOS
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
james, Please be sure to take the time to compose descriptive subjects for your posts; read this for more information.

The majority of questions asked this week will be directed at the author and his book. Please choose a subject that is indicative of your question.

You can go back and change your post to add a more meaningful subject by clicking the .
 
author
Posts: 91
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I prefer tableless design if there's the time and budget. It is harder to do (blame the poor design of CSS for that). For a simple personal site, ease of development rules and I might use tables; but for professional work, and certainly any major public facing site, CSS is the way to go.
 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
author
Posts: 91
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I never stop supporting browsers. The key is to degrade gracefully in older browsers back to Mosaic 1.0. (Remember that?) You don't necessarily have to provide full functionality or a modern appearance to older browsers, but you should give them everything they're capable of seeing. That means putting as much in the HTML content as possible. Never use Flash or JavaScript for anything HTML can do.

Of course, there are lots of things Mosaic 1.0 couldn't do. Feel free to use JavaScript if you're doing something that just wasn't possible in 1994. However if you're building an online store or a newspaper website or a blog something else that did in fact exist in 1994, then a 1994 browser ought to be able to read it.
 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
author
Posts: 91
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
The key to selling refactoring to creative or other groups is to address their pain points. Find out what they're having trouble with, and then choose those refactorings that will assist with that.

Visual creative types do have one particular pathology you'll need to address. They tend to think their job is done as soon as everything looks exactly right in their browser, on their desktop, at their screen size. Thus they tend to create markup that works in only one very specific environment. If you can get away with it, change their computer daily so they never use the same browser, monitor, or operating system two days in a row. (This requires a really good network home directory.) Less radically, just require them to switch browsers regularly.
reply
    Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic