Design without tables, a small inspiration for developers.

Worker Joined: Apr 26, 2005 Posts: 114

Not claiming to be the one-and-only doing this, but today i released [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] with a tableless design, based on div's and CSS.

My goal is simple: make nuke render faster, less html code and make some kind of statement on how nuke could be in the future.

Im fully aware of that this work of mine has it's limitations, however i do belive this will inspire others to make better themes.

It might also be of interest that the core is nuke7.6, chatserv patched and nukesentinel protected. Some minor changes in the code itself was necesarry, however it's not many.
IE6, FireFox and Opera 8.0/9.0 will do fine, however old and outdated browsers like IE4.0, IE5.0 and Netscape 4 will most likely fail. Yet to be checked is Safari for MAC, however i do not expect major problems with this one.

Any comments are most welcome, and if any of you have some kind of experience in this kind of table less design for nuke from before, i would be more than happy to hear from you and/or have a look on how the solution was done.

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

well im no expert but why do i see tons of tables when i look in the source while you see tableless ?

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 9:59 am

...sorry, i should have made myself clearer. The theme is tableless, however some of the modules and a couple of blocks is still using tables in some way.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:21 am

yes i see,but that would be a nice job doing that...
well your on your way... Laughing

its a start.....
as for the theme.....
try to take out the fat borders.....
Wink

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:55 am

lol, thanks for the notice...i will forward that last remark to the graphics designer Very Happy

For further reading, the [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] was of great inspiration to me...hopefully, some day we will see a pure (or should i say near pure, since tables are good in some cases) nuke site without tables.

I also assume this kind of design structure is of great interest for the SEO-guys out there.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 6:14 pm

Also, see this thread:

http://www.ravenphpscripts.com/posts7990-highlight-.html

I've temporarily put this aside but the concept still works. I'm on vacation this week but I will look at your code as soon as I get a chance.

In my opinion, there are going to need to be some tweaks to core NUke to really make this concept work but they are tweaks that won't break old code, or shouldn't.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:33 pm

fkelly has also convinced me of the need for this (and a couple of recent "reads" LOL). I, too, now would love to see more of this. I think a serious look towards accessibility for PHP-Nuke needs to be done. I'd like to see RavenNuke evolve as such too.

Regular Joined: Oct 01, 2006 Posts: 50 Location: UK

I tried building my site with no tables but it made my back hurt leaning down to reach the keyboard.

Rolling Eyes

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 10:24 am

Just a quick reflection. One real problem that I found when I was working on this is that CSS expertise is a specialty unto itself. There are all sorts of problems with exceptions for different browsers and to make something that works even close to universally you need to take them into account. I "borrowed" the CSS layout I used from Skidoo two (link is in the other thread) but I can't say that I understood or mastered every element of it or even close. To really have a "production quality" theme you would need to know all the ins and outs of CSS.

Also, the goal shouldn't be to have a table-less design. Rather it should be to only use tables where they are appropriate, for instance for tabular data. You also need to deal with compatibility with older themes and recognize that some of the code in mainline nuke is going to have opentable() in it for years to come and old themes are going to keep calling that (and closetable and table2). So you need to design your CSS based theme for compatibility with older themes too.

If you do this you can eliminate a LOT of tables. I've looked at news pages in Nuke that when you did view source and analyzed it could be like 20 layers of tables deep. That's a mess to debug and totally unnecessary.

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 1:38 pm

You are totally right fkelly. CSS may be a pain in the ass, just like 20 nested tables is. To make a universal nuke site for all kinds of browsers and version would probably be impossible...but do we really need to consider that? I mean, looking into my stats, i don't see many entries named IE4.0 or 5.0 (which probably are the worst thing ever happened to a web designer). I do see some IE5.5...on the other hand, i don't feel bad about them when they have chosen to use old and outdated browsers.

The goal itself, as you point out very well is to get rid of as many tables as seem practical, and use them where they serve their purpose.

I will continue to make my sites as tableless as possible and hopefully it will come a day when we see a nuke core stripped for layout elements, with all the layout stuff is to be found in a css and theme file.

..oh, for the record...OpenTable() and CloseTable() could just as well contain nested div's instead of nested tables Very Happy

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 6:41 pm

We are pretty much on the same wavelength NoFantasy. In my initial theme.php I did nested divs within opentable and closetable. Then I had a separate reallyopentable() and reallyclosetable() for those modules or sections of modules which really needed a table. However, the other themes still really opened a table with opentable(). If and when I can get back to this I'd really like to look at this and see if I can come up with a more "elegant" approach that doesn't break old themes.

I also did some work looking at the various css tables for the current set of themes in RN. There is a tremendous amount of duplication there and we could easily develop a common.css that would mean that most themes would have like a line of css code at most to differentiate themselves. I had actually implemented this on a test site and it worked fine but I had to pull it back to keep consistent with RN which I was working on. Still it is something that should be revisited.