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Craig Grannell

"The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design"

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TABLES: HOW NATURE (AND THE W3C) INTENDED
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A common way of creating tabular layouts is to chop up a Photoshop layout and use
images to stretch table cells to the correct size. (As mentioned earlier, table cells expand
to the dimensions of their content.) Many designers then use a 1-pixel invisible GIF89
(often referred to as a spacer or shim) to force content into position or stretch table cells
to a certain size. Because the 1-pixel GIF is a tiny file that??™s cached, it can be used hundreds
of times without impacting download times. However, spacer and table layout usage pretty
much destroys the idea of a semantic Web. Because so much of the layout is defined via
inline HTML, updating it requires amendments to every page on the site (which must also
be uploaded and tested in each case), rather than the simple editing and uploading of an
external CSS file.
It is possible to combine CSS and tables??”something that??™s usually referred to as a transitional
layout, although one might argue that the ???transition??? from tables to CSS layouts
should now be considered an historic event. Such layouts are usually created to ensure
layout-based backward compatibility with obsolete devices. This direction should only be
taken when the target audience is known to definitely include a significant number of
users of very obsolete browsers, and also when the layout is paramount to the working of
the site (rather than just the content).


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