What's with all the tables?!!
Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:59 am
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.
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.