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Re: Tables and accessibility, your opinions....

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From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Oct 2, 2005 2:40AM

> I'm of the general opinion that truly accessible web sites should not use
> tables anywhere especially for layout, however an exception could be to use
> [correctly marked up] tables for displaying data (and only data) such as
> calendars.

Well, tabular data is only accessible when marked up as a data table
with the proper attributes connecting the data cells with the headers.
IMHO there is no discussion whether a calendar should be a table or
not.

> For a site with static content the above rule is easy to implement with CSS,
> however I'm finding very few dynamic sites that do not use tables somewhere
> for layout. Of course the W3C guidelines are only guidelines and open to
> interpretation so what constitutes "data" and "layout" could be open to
> debate. Is a list of products REALY "data" and does it need to be displayed
> in a table? It's easy to use CSS and lists to display such info.

The name says it. A list of products can be a list. The use of a data
table in this case depends on the complexity of the list. If you offer
filtering of the list by any of the product attributes a table is the
way to go.

> So I think my first question is this: how do others in the industry feel
> about the use of layout tables? Is there a commonly held belief that all
> layout tables are bad or that are "some" ok if marked correctly?

I haven't used any layout table in the last 4 years, basically as our
products are enterprise level portals and sites that have to be
localised in may languages or rebranded for third party vendors at a
later stage. Only by separating content, structure and presentation
you can easily manage and maintain these. A lot of the HTML is not
developed by web designers, but by the .NET team, and I make sure they
use the right markup for the job.

> My second question relates to server side scripting and my example of a
> product list. While its easy to display product information using CSS it may
> not be so easy to manipulate that information using some dynamic techniques
> without tables, in fact many of the DataBinding and manipulation techniques
> in asp.net positively require tables.

That is a flaw in .NET then and laziness of the vendor to make sure
you can quickly put together dynamic sites without knowing anything
about semantics. Microsoft has lately opened up to work with the WaSP
group to rectify these issues.

It is a matter of how you use .NET, it takes a bit longer but you can
make it stop using bloated controls and generate spans all over the
place. Step away from the design view in Visual Studio.

> So which scripting language do people prefer when building accessible and
> dynamic sites that use as few layout tables as possible? Is that even
> possible?

See above, with the right knowledge and effort it is possible even in .NET.

Flexibility of CSS layouts with dynamic content is a big issue,
especially as still too many designers see CSS as a pretty design
layer rather than as a style sheet. Nobody uses XSLT stylesheets for
creating image replacement, why use CSS?

I have shown with the CSS Table
Gallery:http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ that data tables do not
have to be ugly, I will soon release another project that strives to
show that CSS can be used in an enterprise world, too.


--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/