Who needs a UL?

AnalogNerd

I'm rebuilding an old web app from scratch and I found this. There's a page that has a bulleted list on it. Here's an example of how this was acheived:

•

Text in here for list

Why use UL when you can use a table, and actually put the bullet in manually as a whole separate column! The second TD being wider than the whole table is also a nice touch.

Brady Kelly

:laugh:

englebart

Maybe it was generated from a DB table and they already had a stock routine to convert a result set into a table? call dump_table("SELECT '*', column1 from table1 where listName = 'first';"); There could also be javascript code that captures clicks on table cells?

AnalogNerd

There's nothing like that. It's a static FAQ page.

Kasmarch

screen readers? :((

Brisingr Aerowing

I like how there is no </tr> tag.

Bob Dole

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

:doh: 2.0.82.7292 SP6a

AnalogNerd · :doh: 2.0.82.7292 SP6a

:sigh: That's my fault when typing the example in here I missed it. In reality they did use a </tr> It might be the only thing that was done right in that code.

Brisingr Aerowing

I guessed as much. I often miss out on things when I type, which is why I like autocompletion.

Bob Dole

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

:doh: 2.0.82.7292 SP6a

Climate Turnip

This actually makes a lot of sense. The <ul><li> elements are completely unreliable when it comes to CSS styling across different platforms, also <ul><li> (nearly) always indents within the enclosing element producing alignment issues, again inconsistent across different platforms. At the very least you have to set the indent to a negative value and that does not work consistently. Bottom line, its a formatting nightmare. Having done a lot of html email programming in the past I have to say the use of table cells and inline styling is by far the most portable and reliable code. Anyway, its a redundancy, you're not saving anything using <ul><li> to create a list once you've styled it up, unless you're going for the doc-prof look.

Josh_T

I was just thinkin the same thing. Although I'm a novice, I don't like the pre-formatted version of

and tables offer a convenient way to format things the way I want.

AnalogNerd

This is a static page that's 5 years old, on a website (no other platform). The table is being used to display a list, no javascript hooks, no fancy formatting. This could have been done with a UL so much cleaner, and would have remained semantically correct. Also, I didn't display this code but this page uses the table rows to acheive paragraph breaks.

         User Agreement
       

   

   

       

                To use this site, please read the following statements and indicate you agree...
       

   

   

       

         I understand that this is a sample paragraph of text and I agree

Notice how they're all colspan="2"? That's so later when we get to the "list" the first column can be used for the bullet. Which isn't done with an image, or even • but an actual text • There might be legitimate uses for tables, but this isn't one.

Brisingr Aerowing

throw new TableOverloadException();

Bob Dole

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

:doh: 2.0.82.7292 SP6a