[dokuwiki] Re: [PATCH] various Dokuwiki tests

  • From: Sander Tekelenburg <tekelenb@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:40:23 +0200

At 22:45 +0200 UTC, on 2006-07-30, Andreas Gohr wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:23:21 +0200
> Matthias Grimm <matthiasgrimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> By the way: The form looks like a table why not use <table> for it? It
>> would be pretty hard to do it with CSS (and it is not even more
>> flexible) and all applications I looked into do it with tables. Why
>> not dokuwiki?
>
> Because a table is to be used to display tabular **data** and should not
> be used for design reasons. It is just not semantically correct.

FWIW, IMO form fields and their labels can most definitely be considered
tabular data. (I haven't seen this particular form though, so I can't judge
if it might be an exception.)

To give you an idea of where I'm coming from: I'm a bit of a freak about Web
standards and separation of content and presentation (which is why I recently
asked for help here with removing the presentational markup buttons from
Dokuwiki's Toolbar -- I don't want my users to mess up data with meaningless
markup like <i>, <u> and <b>). The main reason I use Dokuwiki is that it's
one of the few publishing systems that generates decent HTML and CSS. You're
quite right to not want to abuse tables for presentational reasons, but I
feel that forms often *can* be considered tabular data.

If it helps, here are some thoughts of other standards freaks on this subject:
- <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/tables.html#why>
- <http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/tables.html#table-forms>


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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