[development] theme('table')

[Earl Miles]

Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to ask everyone not to use literal <table> <tr> and <td> 
> tags ongoing. We have a theme('table').
> 
> Trivial example: zebra. Instead of striping everything separately we can 
> do it centrally.

theme('table') is a really interesting conundrum. On pages that utilize tables, 
they are great for the programmer, and actually really hard on a designer. As 
we're moving toward templatizing the theme functions of Drupal, there turns out 
to be nothing to put into a .tpl.php for something that is, ultimately, just a 
table.

On the other hand, not using theme('table') has the problem of leading to 
inconsistency. Right now you can do quite a bit by theming all of your 
tables...but no one ever (to my knowledge) actually overrides theme('table'), 
and most of that theming is done via CSS.

I think what this really means is that theme('table') needs to be expanded in 
such a way that we can do named tables that will allow us to invoke individual 
templates in the manner of node.tpl.php. Something like 
table-forum_overview.tpl.php maybe.

I've done a lot of back-and-forth with myself on this one, because there are 
arguments on either side of the fence that are really compelling. I'm curious 
to hear other people's thoughts on this one.