Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
I was under the impression tables were meant for tabular data.
Yep. But if you do them properly, you can use tables for layout and still have your document validate.
Although that makes total sense, it never occured to me...I was always under the impression one would want to validate against the latest standard, which I think was xhtml 2 - or soon to be???
From what I've heard about XHTML 2.0, it's a very theory-based abstract standard that pays little attention to real-world usage and forces massive change.
As for tables, if you were to think of your document in a semantic fashion, meaning reading it top to bottom like a regular document, then using a table (or series of nested tables) would make little sense. Tables for tabular data makes perfect sense, just like lists for lists of data make sense. And there are still a lot of designs that use tables as a design mechanism that will validate because tables are still 100% valid markup elements. The thing to remember is that with a push toward an XML style markup language, syntactically (?) and semantically, your markup should make sense.
Interesting article. I feel that it reaffirms my opinions.
@d11wtq, I think your comments about the errors were rather subjective, especially considering the fact that you can validate pages that really do contain errors. I moved to XHTML for a reason, one that I can't remember at the moment, and the I feel that removing the target attribute was an "error" on W3C's part. I can't imagine any browsers dropping support for it, regardless of the doctype, but if they do I'll move to another solution. There are and will continue to be valid reasons to open new windows, and as I said in another post, I really don't care if W3C says it's valid or not. It's clear that your a validation diehard, and that is fine. I just see it differently than you.
Interesting article. I feel that it reaffirms my opinions.
@d11wtq, I think your comments about the errors were rather subjective, especially considering the fact that you can validate pages that really do contain errors. I moved to XHTML for a reason, one that I can't remember at the moment, and the I feel that removing the target attribute was an "error" on W3C's part. I can't imagine any browsers dropping support for it, regardless of the doctype, but if they do I'll move to another solution. There are and will continue to be valid reasons to open new windows, and as I said in another post, I really don't care if W3C says it's valid or not. It's clear that your a validation diehard, and that is fine. I just see it differently than you.
Why can't you use transitional? I don't understand why you need strict if you can't validate it. Transitional will validate in your case by the sound of it.
I do use transitional. I'm just trying to make a point. The target attribute was just an example. All I am really trying to say is that situations exist where pages wouldn't validate. I'm not against standards and I adhere to them, but to me they aren't definitive.