Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Development Questions

[Shaun M. <sh...@ae...>]

On 20 May 2005, at 14:58, Neal Schilling wrote:
> While I'll agree there are many aspects that make tables  
> appropriate, properly implemented, a DIV can be much more flexible.  
> The ultimate goal, as I see it, would be to eliminate most of the  
> templates and have the CSS generated by the application which turns  
> it into whatever columns, headings, or the like.
>

I'd stop using phpWebSite entirely if it generated the CSS from  
inside the application and we didn't have templates. It'd be a  
terrible resource hog generating CSS files or worse, inline CSS. IME,  
developers often have no idea about design so leaving them to play  
with the crayons is worse than if you let them create templates.


>
> For items that are tabular, a table makes logical sense, but in my  
> experience, I've found that a table should be avoided in  
> formatting, whenever possible. The options they make available are  
> over shaddowed by the difficulty in changing the layout when that  
> becomes necessary.
>

Whilst I agree entirely with static content sites, I disagree  
entirely with template driven dynamically generated sites. IME,  
editing templates is much easier, more powerful and more consistent  
than using CSS entirely.

There's a mix to be struck. I'd hate to see templates go and I'd hate  
to see CSS being generated by PHP code. However, that's not to say  
more CSS and less HTML shouldn't be used where possible.

>
> I honestly doubt that IE7 will have a better complience to the  
> standards than IE6. That just doesn't follow Microsofts habits. The  
> only solution is to find a way to deal with the differences.

ok, but the most differences are in how IE handles CSS and the least  
in it's (X)HTML compliance, so the best solution would be sticking  
with (X)HTML.

Cue someone saying we should do it all in XML and use XSLT ;-)


Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk