Tables on the Web Should Be Super Lean!

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I know! The days of nested tables for creating layouts are long gone. Thank goodness! But we also need to be careful with the tabular information we publish on the web, whether it’s database queries, data stored in spreadsheets, or a simple table an office secretary created in a word processor (BrOffice or Word).

Here’s a scenario: you’ve just received a spreadsheet (Excel or Calc) with the table below, and you need to put it on a web page as quickly as possible. The following fictional image shows an event schedule in the form of a monthly calendar table. Since it needs to be published immediately, your first thought is to use Excel’s Save as HTML option. That’s very inappropriate, though, because it generates a file with an absurd 311 lines of code. If we look at the code, we’ll see that most of it is unnecessary. In part two of this post, we’ll see how to eliminate all that unnecessary code with as little effort as possible.

Web Standards and the Importance of Semantic Markup

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In this first post about web standards, I’d like to discuss a topic that may seem overdone and has been discussed extensively. Unfortunately, some developers do not follow the principles, perhaps out of convenience or lack of knowledge. So I will try to help at least some of them see the light.

I’ll start with two basic concepts, according to Jeffrey Zeldman:

Valid Markup: markup that contains no errors (for example, forgetting to close tags) and no illegal tags or attributes (for example, using the height attribute on tables, which is not allowed).

Semantic Markup on Kind of Idea

Tables on the Web Should Be Super Lean!

Web Standards and the Importance of Semantic Markup