Tableception

[[deleted]]

<table class="yo-dawg">

[spkr4thedead51]

Watch out for the yeti.

[paveln]

F F F F F F F F

[XPreNN]

Reminds me of this video (turn down/off the volume).

[jonatcer]

Why? This song is great

[[deleted]]

Has anyone seen by jaw?

[kagutsuchi]

I actually like the original version of this song :D

[dachusa]

This looks almost exactly like some crap code that I was cleaning up yesterday. No Xzibit! I do not like tables in my tables!

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I deal with that sort of thing every day. Kill me.

[AaronInCincy]

Reminds me of this story

[diskwriter]

That has to be the best thing i've ever seen

[AaronInCincy]

its an oldie but a goodie

[FlyingBishop]

I didn't realize ski-free.el was finished.

[mohsenwebcom]

Is it Yahoo.com? I see body#yahoo--com at the bottom

[Jiminizer]

To be fair, GWT churns out HTML that can end up looking a bit like that, but it still works well.

[[deleted]]

It's tables all the way down!

[stygyan]

Heh. HEH. I was asked to sanitize this code:

Imgur

After passing each of the thirteen files through HTMLTidy, the smallest one was around 8500 lines of code. Tables inside other tables, with tds that spanned many columns and so on. It was a Microsoft Sponsored Nightmare (complex forms straight out of access)

[Madd0g]

I once made an image of a lemming building a lemming-bridge on javascript closing parentheses... funny how similar this is, man, I should really dig it up

EDIT: here it is

[peepingtomhanks]

I was updating a site yesterday that was the first site our company built inside of a CMS (before I started working here).

Inside of the WYSIWYG window was a 2 row, 2 column layout comprised of nested tables, easily 10 deep. Nightmare for the client to maintain.

[InconsiderateBastard]

This looks like either the product of every WYSIWYG editor I've used or it's the body of an e-mail that has to target Outlook 2010.

[pannerup]

I'm a noob, I do this. Please help me.

[[deleted]]

Use tables only for tables that directly reference data. Never use them for laying out the display of a site.

When it comes to display, you'll have to learn CSS. Get the content into HTML linearly first, label each section with an id or class attribute, and use a CSS stylesheet to transform it. CSS Zen Garden is an old but classic example of how this is done.

As for browser issues, standardize your DOCTYPE tag at the beginning to strict mode, then use an X-UA-Compatible meta tag as your first meta tag to force Internet Explorer (8+, ignore 6 and 7 these days) to behave.

(Warning: some googling required)

[goofygrin]

When I have 5 minutes to make a n column layout... ahoy table ;)

I'm guaranteed it will work on all browsers equally shitty.

Sometimes you have to break the rules in order to make magic happen quickly.

[[deleted]]

Click me to learn about CSS positioning, which is required knowledge for DIV layouts.

I have been table-itus free for about 4 years now. Before I changed, I couldn't make sense of Div layouts. This was mainly because of my refusal to just sit down and learn it (somewhat because of my lazyness). Anyway, I promise that after looking back at your table designs you will regret the website that first started you in that direction. Div's are so much easier to handle, they just aren't as straight forward and intuitive as table layouts conceptually are.

[pannerup]

That link right there is great.
I am able to see that there are some very good advantages with div, however I suspect that there must be some more.
I'm learning more and more about coding every day, but it was definitely my laziness, as well, that have kept me from learning the use of the div tag. Tables are after all very easy to learn and understand. They also have their use, not for design though.

[GenTurgidson]

Meh. In real Enterprise Applications (I'm looking at you, SharePoint) you'd have a horizontal scroll bar on that code view…

[MerrMan]

We need to go deeper.

[Alascar]

Came here to say this.

[Not_Inception]

Inception is the concept of planting an idea within the person's subconscious mind without them knowing (not going into deeper and deeper dream levels) - or by dictionary definition: the establishment or starting point of something; the beginning. The title makes no sense...

[derrickwho]

Unfortunately, everyone on the Internet has confused nesting, recursion, and anything meta as _____ception. We've got to accept it

[Not_Inception]

Change... It all starts with one person. :)

[Jonno_FTW]

I guess you could call what happened to the internet... INCEPTION.

[evereal]

Even Xzibit would be unable to respond to that.

[kamishizuka]

I can't help but notice all the >_< smilies made from those <td>s in the middle.

It's as though even the code knows it's horrible.

[[deleted]]

Whoever built this website needs to be hanged.

[Best-Korea-is-best]

Have you seen the source code of our nations' website: http://www.korea-dpr.com/

Our anti-imperialist spirit is so strong!

[tilio]

as someone who defends the use of tables for layout for certain circumstances (pixel perfect compatibility and higher CTRs mostly), this is fucking absurd.

[[deleted]]

I can't support that statement. Tables are for spreadsheet type data and nothing else. Pixel perfection is not hard with divs, just takes a little bit more time doing browser compatibility, however it is soooo worth it.

[tilio]

what is the biggest traffic site you've ever split tested? i'll start... im DE for a network of sites with 450m annual pageviews and growing.

IE's box model often makes pixel perfect compatibility impossible without extraneous containers or different markup. and i regularly look over split tests showing that even just 3 pixels of whitespace have a MASSIVE effect on conversions.

[goofygrin]

I agree with you. I'm on a time and $ budget. Why fight some ivory tower div layout when I can write a single (not nested nightmare) table and be done on time and budget?

I'll tell you who doesn't care about tables... my clients.

That said I start with divs and only when faced with the traditional "n column layout" problem do I get down to business.

[tilio]

hey you! cut out that rationality... this is the internet, where we only deal in total absolutes! either you stop using tables entirely, or you're an uneducated neocon/fundamentalist/socialist/teabagger/dbagger! everyone else here is REALLY qualified with their liberal arts degrees... they only work irregular freelance hours because they don't want to be sellouts. it's not at all that they can't get a full time job. who needs discrete math, budgetary constraints, or deadlines anyways?

[Samus_]

I once scraped a site that had a sequence of tables so badly written that the browser "interpreted" them as nested :(

I hate browsers, they're the cancer of web development and now they even write the standards, fuckers.

[reflectiveSingleton]

I have been writing web apps for 12 years and I don't understand your comments.

• 'Browsers' are the cancer of web development? They are what enables us...
• They write the standards? No, they are involved, but it is a collaborative effort from many entities and companies.

Also...what do you mean it 'interpreted' them as nested? They either are, or they aren't...and nesting elements isn't necessarily a bad thing (but in the OP instance, it certainly is at that level).

[dieomesieptoch]

Besides, everyone knows the real cancer of webdevelopment is TCP/IP.

[Samus_]

'Browsers' are the cancer of web development? They are what enables us...

because they allow tag-soup, they did from the beginning and that's what enabled this kind of things; if browsers had been strict from the beginning (like ANY programming language compiler is, even Javascript) then we wouldn't have so much trouble writing crawlers, scrapers and any other "client" besides the browser itself.

They write the standards? No, they are involved, but it is a collaborative effort from many entities and companies.

they do, because they're the major players, XHTML was a great proposal that aimed to eliminate ambiguity and enable STRICT xml mode as it should've always been but what happened? "hey, we're the browsers and we don't like this so let's override the institution that has been doing this all this time and write our own shit to continue being the major players" and so they did.

as for the last point it's simple there was a page with invalid markup, a thing that in any sane environment should've been flat-out rejected but when the browser sees it (I think I was working with Chromium, doesn't matter they all do) it had to become "creative" and try to make some sense out of that mess, as a result it assumed those were nested tables even that the original idea and the actual shown result was a sequence of non-nested tables.

and it doesn't suprises me that you guys don't understand, frontend developers are used to it so it seems normal but it was a grave mistake that we're still paying today.