Posted by Kevin on 11/05/07 16:22

On Nov 4, 6:16 pm, dorayme <doraymeRidT...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> In article <4uCdnaAAs5pvqLDanZ2dnUVZ_qXin...@comcast.com>,
> Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > dorayme wrote:
> > > In article <nIadnR_KOZMCgLDanZ2dnUVZ_v2pn...@comcast.com>,
> > > Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > >> Tables cannot really be
> > >> fluid.
>
> > > You have said this twice now but have not indicated what you
> > > mean. A table of tabular data can be very fluid or it can be not
> > > very fluid (because of poor design and the use of fixed widths
> > > etc). So what does it mean to say "cannot be really fluid"?
>
> > Let's see you wrap data in a table around a picture, for instance.
>
> Data? Around a picture? In a table? What will it prove to show
> text flowing around a pic in a table cell? If I can show you a
> table with a cell that has a pic in it with text flowing around
> it, will you then give up saying that "tables cannot really be
> fluid"? Are you just going to use the word "really" as a licence
> never to revise your statement and just keep hinting at its truth
> instead of enlarging on it so that what *you* mean is clearer?
>
> Just for the record, I do not think it is a good idea in general
> these days to be using tables for making new pages (using them
> for tabular data is another matter of course).
>
> --
> dorayme

In response to the original posters questions and thoughts I believe
that it is in fact not the death of HTML as the W3C has just finished
gatharing a group of people together to work on a new update above the
HTML 4.01 that is the latest standard release of it. However, One of
the key engineers of Microsoft Internet Explorer is in a lead position
on that project. That could be a very bad thing considering that
Microsoft has publicly stated that their browser will Never Support
the mime type of application-xml . That being said Internet Explorer
will not support XHTML in the way it was created to be used it will
only change the mime type over to text/html which removes any of the
xml abilities from it.

As far as tables go you should still be using tables in your HTML
however only for tabular data or displaying of a chart or table and
not for other positioning. There is no reason to nest tables any
longer nor is there a reason to use tables to position images or even
blocks of text in appealing ways on a web page. Many of the elements
and tags of the old days are now deprecated and should no longer be
used in HTML however they have replacements in CSS.

I think overall it is a pretty good thing personally. Finally after
CSS has been around over 10 years it is starting to come of age and be
recognized as well as improving the web overall. You can make
navigation bars in CSS without images that function faster and do not
contain images yet appear to have a rollover effect that is faster
then JavaScript is.

I also believe it will eventually reduce the number of people out
there that just buy FrontPage and call themselves web designers
without actually knowing any code or programming. It is people of that
nature that have reduced the pay in this industry to a incredibly low
amount of money. Think about it most web designers are selling their
services for less then people will pay their auto mechanic to fix
their car. Most small business owners will try to build their web
sites on their own or higher a High school kid at minimum wage or less
to build them something on the web. Even if the Web designer has a
much higher education level then their auto mechanic.

As far as markup languages go both HTML and XHTML are here to stay.
However they will have to coexist with CSS from now on.

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