Tables

[zaluzianskya]

I've been wondering about this for a while, and just now decided to ask...

Why are tables broken so badly on Dreamwidth? I get that it's for accessibility, but how does removing borders help? How does screwing up the alignment of cells only when one of them contains an image help? (Example: This becomes this [not my entry], but the cells on this entry are aligned just fine.) Edit: That goes for font styling, also. I know <font> is deprecated, but it's hard to get used to using proper CSS on sites where the stylesheets aren't mine to control (not that that's a bad thing, but there's my reason).

I've tried having a screenreader read an ordinary table and then the version of the table that Dreamwidth "fixed" and noticed no difference. So... what exactly is the reason?

Comments

[brownbetty]

Probably at least in part because that usage is deprecated by the W3C. Ideologically, it is preferable if all style information is inside a style="" declaration, and it gives better forward compatibility for things like screen readers. Something like [table style="text-valign:middle"] would probably work to give the effect you are looking for in your tables.

[zaluzianskya]

I went to try that, but all it did was move the text alignment up to above the top of the cell. It did it for text-valign:top, also. And that still wouldn't explain why it doesn't screw up vertical alignment or font styling (which I forgot to mention in the post, but if you look at the links that's an issue also) in tables without images.

[brownbetty]

Okay, but, and this is a horrible thing for me to tell you, most of your html is deprecated. Support is being dropped for things like <font>, <center>, and even things like cellspacing and cellpadding declared inside the tag. I've put together a (un-beautiful) table that maybe at least illustrates what's possible, view source to see its internals.

Words words Words go here. \o/

[zaluzianskya]

I know it's deprecated, but it's really hard to get used to proper CSS since the stylesheets are set in stone on site-scheme pages, y'know?

Thank you! Saving that code so I can study it.

[jeshyr]

To the best of my knowledge, this is not for accessibility reasons but just for layout reasons - it's the way the site scheme organises tables in general and it matches how the site scheme looks.

I suggest you ask in the dw_styles community about it!

[denise]

It's not so much accessibility as cross-browser compatability. The site's base layouts use a CSS reset to strip all browser-provided styling, to even out the playing field so to speak, and then adds it back in via more CSS to make sure that everything renders the same in different browsers. Without this, it's a nightmare of little tricks and things that are in there to support Browser X, which then means another layer of fixes to make the Browser X fix work with Browser Y, which then means another layer of fixes ...

Basically, if we didn't use the CSS reset, we'd have to either a) say flat-out that the site will not be usable in older browsers (which we already have to do to some extent; we just can't make IE6 work with some things, because it's just so standards-noncompliant) or make our stylesheets and layouts about six times the size they are (which causes loading-time issues), and then redo them every time a new browser comes out. Stripping browser-native CSS handling completely gives us a much better chance of making it work for the vast majority of cases.

There are still a few things that we can't quite manage to get the default styling right on, such as tables and the <font> tag (the font tag can honestly never be fixed, but tables we still hold out hope for coming up with a sane default), but all of those things that are broken are seriously deprecated. That's where the accessibility angle comes in, because the stuff that's really broken are the tags that are horrible for accessibility, which is why we aren't all that urgently trying to fix it.

[zaluzianskya]

That makes a lot of sense! Thank you so much for answering. I still don't like it, but knowing why it's done makes it less irritating.

Is there any chance someone could write an FAQ on this?

[denise]

Ta, have opened a bug for someone to do so!