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.

Tables on Kind of Idea

Tables on the Web Should Be Super Lean!