Old skills, new skills
Funny to see Dave Shea’s post on going too far with the ‘look mom, no tables’ gig. Old techniques often fade away and are forgotten or at least ignored. Why? Well, we tend to look for solutions in the techniques we use everyday. Sometimes techniques become more prevalent like the recent frenzy on ‘XmlHttpRequest’ due to crossplatform availability. Will blink and marquee make a comeback?
I never thought there was anything wrong with marquee, other than that it?s not a very good way to
display information. Tables on the other hand are a great way to display information, it?s just a
poor way to layout a page.
When you look at how tables have been worked out compared to other tags its no wonder that designers
opted to use tables for layout. What choice did we have? When designers started using tables in such
a fashion not all of the options that we now have for tables where available. Somehow we never
picked up on them when they did. We ignore them and kid ourselves that we?ve moved on. The whole
‘XmlHttpRequest’ hype showed us that we are all to often sleeping at the wheel.
I just wonder, what else have we missed?