[Wikipedia-l] Re: Avoid tables -- keep it simple!
Karl Eichwalder
ke at gnu.franken.de
Wed Apr 23 02:43:53 UTC 2003
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.
--
| ,__o
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | _-\_<,
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home) | (*)/'(*)
More information about the Wikipedia-l
mailing list