[development] Re: Patches

[Martin Tomes]

Frando (Franz Heinzmann) wrote:
> What about having both in one theme?
> In other words:
> 
> 1. "Perfect" HTML scaffold, no tables, content structure over design,
> can be used as a starting point by designers (and probably will nearly
> always be used)

I would like to caution against having no tables in the layout at all. 
I am working on a site which I laid out with no tables, I spent many 
hours fighting CSS because of this.  I would strongly advocate using a 
single table to contain the left, content and right columns.

I say this even though I am a CSS zealot and have created several non 
CMS sites which have no tables and would do them no other way.  I ended 
up using a single table in my design because in order to get the footer 
in the right place the left and right columns were floated.  Once you 
have floated columns you cannot use clear in the content because the 
content will then clear the columns which is not what you want.  You 
need to be able to use clear in the content so that you can float 
multiple images to one side and have them appear under on another which 
requires clear.

A CMS needs to be capable of displaying whatever content a user wishes 
to create in the content column, you cannot achieve this without using a 
table to layout the columns.  Use XHTML 1.0/Transitional and the layout 
will validate.

If you use CSS for the layout then you will be putting restrictions on 
the mark-up and CSS for the content of the nodes. You may be able to 
live with those restrictions, but we are talking about a layout for all 
users here and not everyone will understand the issues and many people 
will not be able to live with the restrictions the layout imposes on the 
content.

-- 
Martin Tomes
echo 'martin at tomes x org x uk'\
  | sed -e 's/ x /\./g' -e 's/ at /@/'

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