Saturday, November 24, 2007

Why web designers used (and continue to use) tables for layout

Yesterday, after the morning session at the second day of Supernatural 2007, i was 'recruited' to format the programme for the night session in Word (don't miss the dripping sarcasm - it's pretty much a trademark). after trying to lay out the document using tabs, i realised why web designers started using tables for layouts - let's face it, your layout options before tables were pretty much limited to using preformatted text, or long strings of spaces. and after Word nearly had me pulling out Bill Gates' hair, i decided that i'd had enough - simply use an invisible table to lay out the programme in 3 columns, and let Word maintain the spacing and neatness of the entire thing. while i was doing that, it suddenly struck me that the first primordial designer probably had the same thoughts as i did - and started us all down the evil road of table-based layouts. i guess until the day when you can tell the software exactly what you want to do, you'll just get stuck with the idiosyncrasies of whatever software you do use.

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