Talk:Tableless web design

Propsosal: Change to historical perspective

I believe that this page could be improved by changing its focus from an argument for CSS to a historical perspective on why people used tables for design, and the difficulties transitioning from tables. The page should be targetted to people who came across the term "tableless design" and wonder what it means. The structure I propose is:

The first section should describe why people used tables for page layout. This should be written in the past tense.

The second section introduce replacement technologies (with release dates and links to other pages).

The third section should describe historical difficulties of transitioning to CSS (for example, Netscape 4 did not adequately support CSS, and there was not a clear upgrade path for Netscape 4.)

The problem section should be about current thoughts on the term. e.g., this is an antiquated term that only has meaning for people who are using tables for page layout and need to change to CSS. These changes would make the page more interesting and relevant to the casual reader. Yintercept 19:09, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

tidying up page

I've tidied up this article and expanded it a bit. One thing that I thought about including but wasn't entirely sure about was the advantage of tableless web design as far as Search Engine Optimization is concerned. I gather that having a table-less design that is valid (X)HTML does have a beneficial effect on search engine rankings though I'm not 100% sure about this. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me about this aspect of SEO could add some appropriate blurb if it is relevant? Jammycakes 22:19, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would also suggest renaming this page to Tableless Web Design Jammycakes 10:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Really this is just one element of semantic HTML, which in turn is a part of standards-based web authoring. See talk:Tag_soup#Citations and Neologism. —Michael Z. 2006-10-16 05:59 Z

There is a lot of speculation about Tableless design and SEO. I've heard some ridiculous claims. From a search engine's perspective: It is not important how a web designer codes a page rather the content on the page. It could be considered unethical to penalize a web page because it used a certain tag.

In extreme cases excessive tables will impact on search engine rankings but this not due to tables but poor HTML. Any tag will have the same effect if used too much. Rimian —Preceding comment was added at 11:06, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

css cacheing advantages?

The CSS file can also be cached by the browser and so does not need to be re-loaded with every page visit, thereby providing further savings in bandwidth.

Aren't images and HTML also cached? How is this an advantage of tableless web design? I'm not sure I understand what the author is getting at here.

I've reworded it a bit to make it clearer. Jammycakes 07:00, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is a misconception. In some cases, tableless design may infact increase page load times. Rimian —Preceding comment was added at 11:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

why I deleted all the external links

I removed three external links (that was all the external links) because they seemed to be ads -- especially the last two.

Does Wikipedia have a rule that no .com sites are permitted in External Links? I've seen people delete links for that reason alone.

TH 07:09, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You didn't pay much attention to their content, did you? The last was completely non-commercial, a cc-licensed slide show. You also deleted categories and interwiki links. Wake up. —Michael Z. 2006-11-07 13:34 Z

Are they advantages or not?

Why are there purported disadvantages listed in the "Advantages" section? Move them to the "Problems" section! Specifically, see the second and third paragraphs under "Bandwidth Savings" as well as the fourth paragraph and second half of the third paragraph under "Maintainability".

REggert (talk) 16:42, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd suggest not having advantages and disadvantages sections. I thought for&against sections were discouraged because they lead to multiple discussions of the same topic. For example, bandwidth savings would end up being split in two pieces: "clever use of CSS can result in bandwidth savings" in the advantage section and "complex or misused CSS may result in higher bandwidth usage" in the disadvantage section. Maybe advantages and disadvantages could be combined into "Considerations" or something similar. --216.62.101.13 (talk) 20:00, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article is BUNK

This article is basically a POV essay. It makes some bold claims and cites very little. The section on bandwidth savings totally ignores the fact that you can use HTTP to send compressed HTML. What a bunch of baloney. 66.117.135.137 (talk) 04:41, 4 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]