OT: HTML and tables (was Re: First character in

> On 9/13/05, Joris Gillis <roac@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Tempore 15:19:03, die 09/13/2005 AD, hinc in
>> xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx scripsit Michael Kay
>> <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>
>> > I think it's true to say that practices like this were commonplace
>> five
>> > years ago when many of these examples were written - they are still
>> > commonplace today, but no longer regarded as good practice.
>>
>> I can't imagine why any person with commons sense would write such code,
>> even if it was commonplace.
>> I've had the luck (at least I consider it too be luck) not to learn
>> html. I started with XHTML, CSS & XML some years ago before even knowing
>> that 'html' (in the sence of not-balanced markup tags) existed. And I
>> always stayed miles away of anything that looked like WHYSIWYG-editors.
>
> You have the benefit of hindsight Joris, it was only a few short years
> ago that everything was done with tables.  "Common sense" is after all
> by definition what the majority of people  think at the time - it was
> common sense back then to use tables, it's common sense now to avoid
> them...
>

As the example given:

<xsl:variable name="table-heading">
        <tr>
                <td><b>Date</b></td>
                <td><b>Home Team</b></td>
                <td><b>Away Team</b></td>
                <td><b>Result</b></td>
        </tr>
</xsl:variable>

is clearly the heading of a table of results, it's perfectly valid to use
table markup _in_this_case_: that's what table-related tags (standardised
in HTML 3.2) are for. I assumed that the original objection was to using
<td> tags (stands for "table data") when it should obviously be <th> -
"table header".

In addition, using <b> tags for emboldening the text would be irrelevant
if the correct <th> tag was used, as old browser default styles usually
emboldened the contents of <th> tags anyway.

Now, back to XSLT... :-)

Nick.
-- 
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/