What's with all the tables?!!

[werD]

Seriously.. the product list sort options are in a table.. The use of tables for non tabular data makes me nauseous, the only place that it seems justified on the entire site is the accessories list for a product.. This is causing our dev team a lot of extra work as we've had to go through and convert all of the tables to actual semantically structured, fast loading, easily consumed html. I can understand(although I wouldn't let it slide on my team) a developer not understanding asp.net and using a datalist(wraps entire list in a table) with a nested table for the item template when a repeater with a ul header/footer and div makes a lot more sense, but there are places where the table spam is obviously on purpose because of a lack of understanding of proper css layouts. It's ridiculously out of place in 2010.. If you need a full width container split into two columns set your wrapper element to display:block; width:100%; and float any inner elements to the side you need... don't use a table with the align property set in the markup to layout elements... just don't.

It's taken us less than 16 man hours to strip all of the tables from the front end code, but now we have a lot more work when updates come around because we have to manually pull out the changes and merge them with the type of xhtml that our clients expect

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.. The data layer has been a joy to use, but the coding standards we have encountered in the front end of able commerce are very disappointing.

[Kalamazoo]

Hi Drew,

Are you using 7.03? 7.04? I am just curious about your findings here. I would like to learn more about this issue since we develop for clients now.

Thanks,

Phil Chrisman

[sweeperq]

Agreed. One of the first things I did was go through the templates and replace the tables with divs. It only took about 30 minutes, but I haven't done anything with the CSS yet to get it to disply the way I want. Haven't done anything with the controls just yet.

[rjcuser]

Is there a reason why there are still so many tables?

[sweeperq]

Ok, I see what you mean now. It was pretty simple to replace the base layout tables, but I didn't realize how many of the controls in the ConfLib were designed with tables. Luckily, most of them are pretty small and self-contained, so they should render pretty quickly (as opposed to having the entire layout wrapped in a table, which renders much slower). But if you are a neat freak and only want tables when there is a real need (tabular data), I can see where this could be a problem.

[jmestep]

Some of the .net controls for repeating data render tables by default. If you change everything over to repeaters,then you can put divs inside the repeaters.

[steveb51977]

Has this issue been addressed?

I have seen other ecommerce platforms that have changed and use all DIV tags and CSS for formatting which is very helpful for modern browsers and mobile devices. Does AbleCommerce plan on changing their UI to support modern standards versus table tags?

This is one issue that has prevented me from switching my clients to AbleCommerce. I know it seems minor since Able Commerce has a much better core framework, but it is very important to have a modern and flexible UI (especially for mobile devices) to attract customers.

Thanks