killer reason for not using tables?

William Tasso wrote:

Alexander Weber wrote:
"William Tasso" <news27 (AT) tbdata (DOT) com> wrote:

picayunish wrote:
...
Where can I find those browsers, that can disabling tables.

Lynx

My Lynx shows tables. The table cells are lined up under each other.

Really? Mine doesn't. Perhaps it is markup dependent - do you have a url?

I think it depends on how much content is in a cell. It does try to
line up columns when possible, but if there is enough content in a cell
to cause line-wrapping, Lynx will probably linearize the table, or at
least that cell/row. It can get messy if the table has a mix of short
and long cell content.

Links, however, has an option to specifically disable table support.
BTW, Links has become my browser of choice on Linux. I think it's a
better text browser than Lynx, and I'm even starting to like it better
than most graphical browsers.

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Alexander Weber wrote:

My Lynx shows tables.

Yes, recent versions kinda sorta can, as long as you don't play with
colspan, rowspan, etc, and as long as the data in each cell is short...
there are a lot of "if"s involved.

Older versions used to implement </td><td> as a space and </tr><tr> as a
new line.

Links is even better than Lynx. It can handle more complex tables and
FRAMES!

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me - http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?page=132

kchayka wrote:

...
Links, however, has an option to specifically disable table support.
BTW, Links has become my browser of choice on Linux.

Would you know if there's a windows version - no *nix workstations here.

I think it's a
better text browser than Lynx, and I'm even starting to like it better
than most graphical browsers.

that's some recommendation - I'll have to take a peek

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

Sometime around Fri, 7 Nov 2003 00:14:12 -0000, William Tasso is reported
to have stated:

kchayka wrote:
...
Links, however, has an option to specifically disable table support.
BTW, Links has become my browser of choice on Linux.

Would you know if there's a windows version - no *nix workstations here.

I've got it running on Win2k. Not sure where I downloaded it from, though.

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

"jake" <jake (AT) gododdin (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote

In message <Kazqb.181432$bo1.178050 (AT) news-server (DOT) bigpond.net.au>, rf
making.it.up (AT) the (DOT) time> writes
Hmmm.
Disabling tables. I thought you can only disabling JS and Cookies with
the
browsers.
Where can I find those browsers, that can disabling tables.

Any text to speach browser.

They don't do tables. They don't do images. They totally screw up frames
or
rather frames totally screw *them* up. They only read the content. If the
tables do not linearise correctly then you get jumbled content.

I may have got this wrong, but are you saying that
screen-readers/voice-browsers (i.e. 'assistive technology') can't handle
tables, images, and frames?

Yes, I am, in many cases. The worse the authoring the worse the support.

Lets take them individually.

Tables.

I construct a two column table to contain two columns of text. I put these
columns in two different cells. 4 cells all up. The text is supposed to be
read top to bottom, like a newspaper.

Sentence 1 Sentence 3
Sentence 2 Sentence 4

A visual browser will display this correctly. An aural browser will read:
<quote>
Sentence 1
Sentence 3
Sentence 2
Sentence 4
</quote.

This is an example of a table not linearising correctly. The content is
there, it just does not mean anything.

Images.

An aural browser can not display an image. It has no screen, just a
loudspeaker. The aural browser will read the contents of the alt attribute
the author has thoughtfully provided, and just how often is that *not*
provided. No alt text and the browser reads:
<quote>
images slash roo dot jpeg
</quote>

Frames, the worst case of all.

Download a copy of lynx, it's a free text only browser. It gives you a good
idea of how a page will sound when read by an aural browser.

I fired up lynx and found a random framed web site. This is what lynx
displayed:

<quote>
FRAME: top
FRAME: contents
FRAME: main
FRAME: right
FRAME: bottom

This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them.
</quote>

When I navigate to one of these frames I can not go back to the frameset
because there is no like from the frame back to the frameset.

Not very user friendly, is it.

Cheers
Richard.

Toby A Inkster wrote:

Links is even better than Lynx. It can handle more complex tables and
FRAMES!

Yeah and images and JavaScript and...

Links is best when all that stuff is disabled.

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Sometime around Fri, 07 Nov 2003 01:02:13 GMT, rf is reported to have
stated:

I construct a two column table to contain two columns of text. I put these
columns in two different cells. 4 cells all up. The text is supposed to be
read top to bottom, like a newspaper.

Sentence 1 Sentence 3
Sentence 2 Sentence 4

A visual browser will display this correctly. An aural browser will read:
quote
Sentence 1
Sentence 3
Sentence 2
Sentence 4
/quote.

This is an example of a table not linearising correctly. The content is
there, it just does not mean anything.

One of the reasons, of course, for not using tables for layout. If those 2
columns were divs, then the text browser would linearise them correctly.
:-)

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

William Tasso wrote:

kchayka wrote:
...
Links, however, has an option to specifically disable table support.
BTW, Links has become my browser of choice on Linux.

Would you know if there's a windows version - no *nix workstations here.

<URL:http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/>

Windows version is still beta, I haven't tried it yet.

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"rf" <making.it.up (AT) the (DOT) time> wrote:

I construct a two column table to contain two columns of text. I put these
columns in two different cells. 4 cells all up. The text is supposed to be
read top to bottom, like a newspaper.

Sentence 1 Sentence 3
Sentence 2 Sentence 4

A visual browser will display this correctly. An aural browser will read:
quote
Sentence 1
Sentence 3
Sentence 2
Sentence 4
/quote.

This is an example of a table not linearising correctly. The content is
there, it just does not mean anything.

Is this not only an example of bad table coding? If you had used e.g.
only two cells in one row you wouldn't have had a problem with the
aural (or text) browser.

On the other hand, I could give you an example of bad CSS coding as
well:

code:
<div class="A">Sentence 1</div>
<div class="B">Sentence 3</div>
<div class="C">Sentence 2</div>
<div class="D">Sentence 4</div>

with a corresponding style-sheet (defining positition:absolute for the
different classes), a "normal" visual browser would show the "correct"
content:
Sentence 1 Sentence 3
Sentence 2 Sentence 4

But an aural/text browser will read:
Sentence 1
Sentence 3
Sentence 2
Sentence 4
.... which is not what we want.

What I want to say is, that many people claim, as in this thread, that
tables are evil per se and cannot be displayed correctly by aural/text
browsers. But I don't see a problem if tables are used carefully. If
you use tables in "the wrong way" (as your example above) of course
they cause troubles, as any other html flaws. But what is wrong when
using simple, well considered table structures?

There comes again the question about the killer reason against tables
from the OP.

Btw., I don't like tables neither. But I think its more for esthetic
reasons. And that's not a killer reason IMHO. That's why I would also
be interested in _good_ arguments against tables.

Alex.

Mark Parnell <webmaster (AT) clarkecomputers (DOT) com.au> wrote in
news:82vmp1canwvz.1hmxtbmd5yxtv.dlg (AT) 40tude (DOT) net:

Sometime around Thu, 6 Nov 2003 22:42:08 +0100, Nico Schuyt is
reported to have stated:

In the discussion not the tables are disabled but the visitor.

nitpick mode="political_correctness">The visitor _has_a_disability_.
They are not disabled.</nitpick> :-)

There's actually a legal reason why disability-rights laws like the
Americans with Disabilities Act refer to "persons with disabilities" rather
than "disabled persons": the latter is what lawyers call a "term of art"
which means that it has a very specific meaning in law, a meaning that
doesn't correspond to its vernacular meaning. In particular, "disabled
person" is a term of art for a person who is entitled to certain financial
benefits (either public or from private insurance) as a result of medical
problems making him unable to earn more than a certain amount of income.
Since disability-rights laws primarily deal with people who don't meet that
definition, they have to use a different term. Otherwise courts would
interpret the laws as applying only to people who qualified for benefits,
which in the case of things like employment discrimination would lead to
all sorts of nonsense.

As it turns out, the popular conception of "disabled person" somewhat
resembles the legal term of art, so I don't think it's quite fair to refer
to the distinction as mere "political correctness"; it's more a matter of
precision in language. There are lots of people who have disabilities, but
would consider "being disabled" to be something else entirely. The latter
sounds to me as if it's implying something a lot more pervasive than the
former. It comes off as what Gordon Allport, in his classic _The Nature of
Prejudice_, called a "label of primary potency"; a characteristic that's
taken to be the *defining* characteristic of a person or a thing. And such
labels can have unintended effects, even though they're usually well-meant.

("Joe Blow is 26 years old. He lives in Seattle, is married with one
child, plays bass in a local punk band, and works as a programmer for
Microsoft." For some people, the overriding impression they'd get from
that is "agent of the Evil Empire." That's an illustration of a label of
primary potency at work.)