Journal de bord

Dans le groupe “Web Standards” de LinkedIn, je viens de tomber sur ce qui ressemble à un vieux troll moisi :

On Friday I received a status report from the web development company doing the back end of my client’s new web site. In the report was an explanation about why the sidebar on the left side of the page had to be shorter than the main content panel when my Photoshop layout showed the sidebar and main content equal heights. Perhaps it was my naivete when I expected their css-based layout to do what tables used to. Maybe it has to do with the development company who doesn’t have a designer on staff to act as an advocate for the integrity of the client’s design. Or maybe it’s a bit of both.

After doing a search on how to make a css-based sidebar 100% the height of the content panel, I understood the problem. The css declaration “height:100%;” doesn’t do what it promises. The only solution is write a lot of additional css code to act as a hack or workaround and many of these solutions fall apart depending on the browser. It seems that those responsible for determining that css was the new page layout standard gave designers sub-standard tools to work with and didn’t fully think through the functionality.

In all of this I keep coming back to tables. The same layout for my client’s web site done in tables would have easily matched my Photoshop page layout. In spite of the fact that we are told that browsers may end their support for tables, it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t expect it to happen soon. Tables render the same across almost all major browsers and there are a lot of table-based sites out there

I have seen a lot of people bashing table-based design recently. However in defense of tables, a table-based layout can be created with a minimum of code. It doesn’t require a page and a half of additional code to make the layout work properly. I am seriously considering going back to tables for my own web design. I will only abandon tables when the W3C or whomever makes these decisions provides designers like me better tools that work more reliably.

Mark

Ma curiosité étant piquée, je suis allé voir ce que faisait ce “web designer”. Et j’ai compris que ce n’était pas un troll, qu’il était tout à fait sincère. Je pensais qu’on avait définitivement eu la peau du “table-based layout”, il y a encore des îlots de résistance. Pédagogie, pédagogie, et encore…