Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/16/06 13:21

Robert S. wrote:

> I would like to create a photo gallery. I'm asking myself whether to use
> tables or style sheets for putting the photos.

First of all, there are any number of scripts out there that do this
automatically, along with auto-thumbnailing. You have to have a very
good reason before it's worth doing it yourself.

A "gallery" needs two parts: menus of many images and one-image views.
The "single image" view can be done perfectly well with CSS and I see
few reasons to use a <table> for it.
Here's a crude format I use for blogging (does text alongside, although
the CSS is fairly ugly):
http://codesmiths.com/dingbat/lj/200608_wales/

When you're showing "lists of images" then there's some argument for
shoing them in a <table>. If this becomes two-dimensional, then it's a
good argument for <table>. If you want "grid-like layout" (i.e. a
single dimensional list wants common sizing between list elements,
rather than fluidly sizing each element) then that's a good argument
for using a <table> too.

I wouldn't use a <table> just to arrange captions around a single image
though, whether this was a one-off for one large image on a page, or if
it were a repeated structure shared across multiple images in a gallery.

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