BBC NEWS PAGES
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- johnnnnyh
Just looking at the source code on this and noticed it's a table based layout. Odd that the beeb's site is often seen as best of breed and yet that "layout" is not built with CSS.
I guess it'll be updated some time. Any views from yourselves?
- cosmoo0
to hell with css. tables rule! I saw that yesterday too, they have it right. why go through the nonsense of browser bs.
- johnnnnyh0
I know exactly what you mean. It's a solution so why not use it just because someone (who probably never built a web page commercially) says it shouldn't be done that way.
Nevertheless I remain suprised that they did it with tables.
- voiceof0
Which pages are you looking at? There home page which, if i'm not mistaken, is what they will eventually apply to all their pages, is built with Divs
- johnnnnyh0
Look at a news content page. Tables all the way. And from what I can see these have undergone a redesign since the left hand menu is different from how it used to be.
- YAYPaul0
The actual layout design of the news pages hasn't changed though, they just have a new skin. Much easier to change some style sheets than reocode the whole thing.
- kelpie0
its bad practice pure and simple, there is no reason whatsoever not to build that page to standards. Sloppy.
"its a solution" doesn't cut it.
- ximeraLabs0
From what I can tell, they use divs for the page structure and tables nested in divs for actual content placement. Don't see anything wrong with that.
- moth0
The News pages are still years old - that's why it's tables. All they've done is re-skin it.
I don't think you grasp the near impossible nature of recoding the whole of that site! One, day this will be DIVs. Just not for a while yet.
- creative-0
The page loads quickly and displays correctly when I visit the site, that's all the bothers me.
- YAYPaul0
@Kelpie
There's been a number of times I’ve worked on a project where this has happened, usually for the same reasons: Time and money. It would take way too much time away from other projects and cost too much in man hours compared to the gain.
It's a crappy way of working yes, but most project planners are going to work to the quickest short-term gains. While I have no doubt the designers (I know a couple there) would have asked and planned for a full rework, ultimately the project managers would get that down to 'how much time just to reskin', probably adding 'we'll come back and rework it once xxx projects are complete'.Unless there is a major change in thinking within businesses we're almost always going to see projects cut down so they are optimised for short term gains, even if in the long run that makes things take longer. It's shit, but that's the way it is.
- creative-0
I'd rather have it left as is instead of a hike in my TV license just to change a few 1s and 0s
- rafalski0
I miss tables. Not the code structure them, because it was crap, but their functionality for layout that was never fully replaced with 'tableless' CSS.
A great article on Standards being err.. imperfect themselves as a big reason they were never properly implemented in a browser.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/it…
- moth0
I disagree. If you think functionality for layout is lost with CSS, then you don't know how to use it well enough.
And nothing is ever "perfect". Just as software changes constantly, so will the web and it's foundations.
- johnnnnyh0
I think my issue is about how much time I seem to spend trying to find a "solution" without using a table, when a table would do it pretty quickly (used in the same way that the BBC use them). Nevertheless there's this unseen, unchallengable, "voice" which states that using a table is somehow wrong.
Totally agree that they probably had budget constraints, time etc. which has resulted in a hybrid solution with a bit of old and new mixed together.
I suppose I wish when they put out CSS/standards someone had said that we should use CSS where possible but that there are things it can't do and in those cases we're OK to use a table to hold the structure together.
I know no one will be able to definitavely go back on this, but I feel that some one somewhere "set a standard" but they had no thought about the real world impact of that.
- YAYPaul0
I usually work to layout being in Divs and complex tabular data in tables. It makes sense to use them for the purpose they were designed for.
- Mojo0
Guys,
Think how many old news articles are on that site.
Just a thought.
- Mojo0
I mean,
Us > BBC
- moth0
There are two types of people in this thread. Those who understand CSS, and those who don't.
Not understanding it also exposes a poor understanding of basic HTML markup, and semantic markup.
If you are in this game, you should at least be good at it. There's no excuse for marking up new builds in tables. It's plain wrong. There is no middle ground or debate. It's flawed on many, many levels.