visnum

I appreciate tableless design and I am an eager advocate of a semantic web, divs instead of tables, content that form the shape, all the bells and whistles and the better accessibility it brings.

Unfortunately, there are still problems with tableless design. For instance, there is this firefox bug about two divs nested in one. Firefox does not recognize the width of the first div when you nest two divs inside a container div. More important than that, Internet Explorer still cannot handle divs properly.

Of course there are always workarounds to those problems. You can create tableless cross-browser design via css hacks, conditional internet explorer html interpretations, etc.

However, when it comes to everyday designer with deadlines and less time for the learning-curve of tableless design and css hacking, design without tables can become a nightmare just because of cross-browser compatibility issues.

The optimum solution to this might be using tables less than before and creating a design where tables are just used for main positioning. This can eliminate the time and effort until each and every designer have her/his time to develop skills enough to cover tableless cross-browser compatible design, or until Internet Explorer dies, or until each and every browser agrees upon a certain CSS specification especially on positioning of elements.

Good news is tableless design is not necessary for a valid XHTML design and making use of semantic markup. More important than tableless design is the semantic markup and the use of proper (x)html elements when organizing the data, the content that the page should serve to visitors.

You can still make use of h1, h2, h… header tags, li, ol, ul, dd, dt, dl, etc., tags that tells search engine robots what your page is about and how it can be indexed properly.

Tableless design is still necessary and should be a standard when we talk about a more accessible web. Making use of tables for positioning is not a good practice, I am not here to tell you that there is no harm in using tables. I just want to tell you that you can still create valid (x)html and semantic markup and be more accessible than the past, until you learn about CSS hacks and a cross-browser compatible tableless design.

Don’t give up on accessibility, valid and semantic markup just because you are not ready to do tableless design. Try to take your time and make progress in this transitional period. This is why we call certain DTD (Document Type Declaration) as transitional.

WordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.

WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.

I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.

Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?

Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.

Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?

It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.

It was a couple of months ago, I started to track criticisms of web 2.0, after having read something like “web 2.0 is all about fancy graphs and ajax” on the web.

Well, first of all, web 2.0 is a set of web applications and web sites which were not available with the technology and broadband internet connections a couple of years ago. Thus, first of all, web 2.0 is being able to watch a video of a breaking news over the net, without major interrupting of the video and and without being stuck in a low resolution and being able to watch it in a size that is bigger than a square-inch.

Now, I would like to say some more on “the fancy graphs”. It looks weird to me that when some people come across a design which is more usable and more readable than the past, their first reactions is really cheesy. I agree that there are very amateur designs that aim just being fancy only. However, there are lots of improvements in usability and readability of the web since web 2.0 is here. The reason it got more usable and more readable is that educated people on design and usability are hired more than the neighbor’s son as a web designer and developer.

Some people even criticize the use of big fonts, white space, etc. in a way as if they are not necessary for the presentation of information in a web site.

I just don’t understand why sometimes some people tend to get irritated by better design and better usability. This is why I call that a weird criticism.