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

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From: James Pickering
Date: Oct 3, 2005 8:00PM

For one view on this see Neil Crosby's page http://www.workingwith.me.uk/tablefree/

I employ table-free layout on my pages.

James Pickering
http://jp29.org/


----- Original Message -----
From: Ben Dykes
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 6:09 AM
Subject: [WebAIM] Tables and accessibility, your opinions....


Hi there,



I'm relatively new to the list so apologies if this has been debated before! J But...



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.



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.



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?



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.



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?



Thanks for your insights!



Regards



Ben







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