wheresrhys

A few months ago a blogger posted a now infamous post on the falilings of CSS as a design tool, and advocating tables be used instead (if you want to read why he’s wrong, this is probably the best riposte, quite rightly pointing out that he thinks because he is bad at CSS then CSS must be too hard to do design with, and you can justify using tables instead).

But what I found most notable about the whole debate was how he throws meaningless phrases around and no-one seems to pick him up on it.

For instance

tables have the correct semantics for doing layout

What on earth does this mean? From dictionary.com:

Semantics: the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc.

Well, what he seems to be saying is that tables’ meaning is “used for layout”, but the whole point is that they don’t!

In another article I think he reveals his not particularly investigative side.  In response to a comment:

> put your content inside a table, lose most users with disabilities

That is far from clear. I just did a Google search on “html accessibility tables” and got a zillion pages on how to make tables accessible. Even the W3C’s own web site says you can make accessible web sites using tables as long as you adhere to certain constraints.

Well, I did that search for html accessibility tables, and most, if not all, of those zillions of pages are about making html data tables more accessible. If you search for html accessibility tables layout you will find a lot of pages explaining why you shouldn’t use tables for layout as it’s inaccessible. The only article I could find condoning table use dated from 2002, in a time when dreamweaver still largely used tables, and the condoning was merely an acknowledgement that while the standard tools in the industry still used tables you couldn’t expect everyone to switch over overnight. In fact the article opens with a pretty good summing up of what’s wrong with tables.

So, why have I written this article, responding to something from a few months ago? Simply to illustrate that there is still so much junk been pumped out onto the internet on designing using tables that it is as hard as ever to find information on designing tables.

The new specs for HTML 5 and XHTML2 are being hammered out at the moment, and I think for many year hence too. While reading the Jungle Book in the park just now and ruminating on how best to build a certain navigation without too much superfluous html it occurred to me that there were two reasons for trying to minimize the extranuous html:

1. More tags means a higher code to document ratio, which means lower rankings in Google
2. The extra tags are confusing for screen readers

Then I thought of a possible solution to part 2.

Empty tags (such as the <em>’s used in the navigation of this site) and other meaningless bits added to the html for the sake of making the design work could be wrapped in special tags that:

1. Semantically mean “the thing inside me has no meaning”
2. Can easily point out to screen readers that what is inside them is to be ignored

Thus making the designer’s life easier without compromising accessibility

These tags could be <nomeaning><empty><e>, or anything really. There’s plenty of possible unused words.

Yes I know it’s not finished, but I’m quite happy I’ve managed to create a menu with angular areas just with css… no Flash required!