Bundled and Legacy Themes

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee on Tue 12 of Aug, 2008 15:31 GMT-0000 posts: 254

Well, the objections to tables are mainly that they were never actually meant to be for layout, bur rather to hold tabular data, and also that they make the page hard to understand for screen readers or other nonstandard web clients. So in an ideal world we wouldn't want to use them for layout. But for some types of visual arrangements it's hard to avoid at least one. For a theme like Kubrick, where the content is in a center rectangle with three columns and margins on each side, in my experience there's no way to do that without a table, and have the center column be able to widen to accomodate large data tables or images, etc. Also screenreaders are apparently able to cope with a table used like this.

TikiWiki probably has some of the most demanding requirements for the layout method due to its expected flexibility. Not only does the center column change width dynamically, but also either or both of the side columns can be turned off by the user on any page. This makes it pretty hard to have a visual design that works nicely in every configuration and isn't to heavy with overhead. I think the Faulkner theme is probably the most complex due to its page background images.

-- Gary