Hello friends, I am creating a forum now and I was wondering if it will be a good idea to use tables to group the forum data? Are tables obsolete by now? Thank you very much! Best Regards Stefany
You're creating a forum system from scratch? That seems like a huge undertaking. Why re-invent the wheel, unless you are developing a competing software, rather than merely building your own website? There are options out there both of the free (phpBB, etc), and paid (vBulletin - what this site uses, Invision Board, etc) varieties. But to answer your question, tables are not obsolete. The issue with tables is in days of old, people laid out their entire site using tables. Tables are for tabular data. I suppose this could make for an interesting semantics debate. I personally see no problem with displaying a list of threads using tables. Invision does this, and it just makes sense to me. vBulletin accomplishes this without tables, somewhat to my surprise, and I don't know if I agree with that, to be honest. I mean, you've got actual columns: 'thread icon', 'thread title', 'thread data (replies/views)', 'thread last post'. Why in the world they would want this to be a series of floated DIVs is beyond me. It seems to me that this sort of thing is exactly what <table> is meant for!
I want to create a forum from scratch because 1. pre - made software sucks 2. frameworks also suck 3. training, I will get a huge learning experience But thank you, I will be using tables then. and BTW I already have a website of course. Why would I be creating a forum instead...
Tables should be used for tabular data -- the fat bloated "never use tables" nonsense found in the recent skins of forums softwares (like vBull) throws non-semantic code that's many, many times larger at it, abusing multiple lists and headings around elements that are neither, and then has the cojones to call it "more semantic". A forum index or board/topic index is quite obviously tabular data -- each row is a record, each column is a field; therein use a table. A list of posts on the other hand, not so much, though if you want certain things aligned certain ways, sometimes display:table-cell just doesn't cut it and you may end up resorting to using it there too. ... and when you use tables, for god sakes remember that there's more that goes inside TABLE than just TR and TD... you have caption, TH, TBODY, THEAD, TFOOT and attributes like SCOPE... leverage them whenever possible. I see one more <td colspan="6" class="title"> or <td class="heading"> I may end up on a killing spree.
Thank you deathshadow, that helped! And I like your signature, only you support my opinion about libraries!