Posted by Ben C on 07/27/07 20:27

On 2007-07-27, Jim <blkbam@gmail.com> wrote:
> The popularity of the style of my design or it's "beauty" was not my
> question. I understand that many feel the css is the only way to go
> but the fact remains that, and I know that this is hard to swallow,
> table designs do work and the only browser that seems to choke on them
> is FireFox. IE, Opera and Safari seem to handle it fine.

No I was asking a real question. What _specifically_ is it that you
think Firefox is doing wrong with your page, in other words, what
behaviour do you expect, and why? If it turns out there are actually
bugs in Firefox with this you can report them. Equally likely in this
case though, as I was trying to explain, is that you are looking at
legitimately different interpretations of how to compute row and column
dimensions when rowspan and colspan are involved, since this is not
precisely described in any W3C standard or specification.

In the case of your page the suggestion is not just general "tables bad
CSS good". You have produced unnecessarily complex input that relies on
unspecified behaviour. Speaking purely practically, this table design of
yours does not work. OK it looks the way you want it to on IE, but do
you know why? How did you arrive at this design in the first place?

I don't believe you need all these rowspans and colspans and nested
tables, your layout is fairly simple and could be realized with a very
small amount of CSS that was easy to understand both by humans and by
browsers. I think this will be much easier to do that trying to sort out
what you've got.

>>s If you'd like to explain exactly why you expect your riot of rowspanning
>> and colspanning cells to look any particular way I would be interested
>> to hear it.
> ...
>> Rowspan and colspan make life even more complicated because the browser
>> has to decide how to distribute the contribution of a cell's content
>> dimensions and any styled or percentage dimensions on it across the rows
>> or columns it spans.

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