WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

Tables
Descendant selectors are essential for avoiding the need for extraneous classes and IDs that might otherwise
litter an XHTML document. By using descendant selectors, the CSS rules can be made more specific, and
there is no limit to how far down the tree a descendant selector will go—the child of a child of a child of a
parent perhaps?
In essence, a table is for tabular data, and tabular data only. Most responsible designers still use tables. You may not be able
to avoid them, but it is important to use them only when necessary.
Tabular data cannot be organized by CSS layout alone, or would make little sense if you tried to do so. Many
designers have concocted methods of rendering complex tabular data such as calendars, timetables, and so
on with pure CSS layout and positioning. That’s great, and certainly an achievement of sorts, but remove the
style sheet, and everything falls apart. The beauty of the table is that it presents information semantically,
provides numerous elements for CSS styling, and still makes perfect sense should the style sheet be made
unavailable.
For the Dirty Pretty Things discography, a table is populated with rows of information relating to each song. If a song has
lyrics, audio, video, guitar tabs, or images assigned to it, a small check image is placed in the appropriate cell. The markup is
fairly straightforward and is bereft of any additional IDs or classes.
TitleReleased
L
A
V
G
I
Comments
Wondering
08/05/06
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chapter 1 Semantic Structure, Dirty Pretty Presentation
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