[Wikipedia-l] Re: Avoid tables -- keep it simple!

[Karl Eichwalder]

tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> writes:

>>   <dl>
>>    <dt>Official language</dt>
>>    <dd>Arabic</dd>
>>
>>    <dt>Capital</dt>
>>    <dd>Baghdad</dd>
>>
>>    ...
>>   </dl>

> And in Wiki markup it's just
> ; foo : bar
> ; foo2 : bar2

Sure.  Please allow "|" as an alternate term delimiter, BTW; ":" often
is part of the term (URLs!!) and thus you cannot use it without
"<nowiki>" tricks.

> Great for stuff that needs only 2 columns. Eg the Nobel Prize lists.
> But for more complex data, Mav is right - tables are vital.
> Move them out of the article source text & we're all happy :-)
> * readers get clear tables
> * easily-scared n00bs get no evil table HTML in source code
> * anyone who wants to edit the article text doesn't have to scroll down
>   through pages and pages of table code

It's of no use to talk about such a strategie without referring to
existing articles ;)  Let's modify the Kuwait article accordingly...

Also you must not use table for navigation bars.

> (and as for text-only browsers... <table> has been around for a LONG
> time. Surely text-only browsers have some sort of system for coping with
> them?)

No, not really.  w3m is advanced, but I cannot use it for various
reasons (e.g., UTF-8 support it's flaky) and tables in general will not
work as long as you cannot use a wide xterm (80 chars are often not
enough).

Another drawback concerning tables is, that when printed they often
don't look that good.

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