Posted by Manuel Lemos on 05/10/05 05:13

Hello,

on 05/09/2005 08:24 PM Mary-Anne Nayler said the following:
> Nested tables are the absolute worst thing you can do! A screen reader
> is able to tab to a table and tab within a table but once you begin to
> have tables within tables, UGH! To quote accessibility guru Joe Clark;
> "With nested tables, a screen reader user ends up working from within a
> maze formed by one table within another". All you coders out there know
> how hard it is to code nested tables and how confusing it gets right?
> Imagine trying to reverse engineer this jumbled mess with nothing but
> audio to go on!

I know that very few sites use it, but I think that is why the attribute
tabindex exists:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-tabindex

The way I see it there are more non-obvious reasons that preachers of
usability without tables miss, like the fact that the alternatives that
they suggest based on CSS/DIV/SPAN give other headaches to site
developers that want to implement sites that look the same in different
browsers but sometimes is almost impossible as such browsers do not
interpret the standards the same way.

Probably because tables were introduced long before the DIV/SPAN layout
based mania, it seems tables work more reliably and allow developers to
assure a more consistent visual across browsers.


--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP
http://www.phpclasses.org/

PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products
http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/

Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator
http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html

[Back to original message]