The Perpetual n00b - All Comments

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

Paul — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:47:54 GMT

I checked out DonDraper's suggestions and they are as I expected. The "Advanced" sample I saw of formassembly even used tables for some layout. wufoo had some good solid markup and CSS, but man I've gotta tell you it's a LOT of CSS to pull off. I really really want to do things the "right" way, but I feel like I've got to spend too much time hacking things up to do pure CSS for complex forms. I wish they were all simple one label, one input rows but that's just not reality in complex business applications. Perhaps the thing that rubs me the wrong way the most about it is having to explicitly define widths to mimick what tables do naturally. I've worked on sites that have complex forms on many many pages and that leads to a LOT of definitions to shore each one up individually. And each time a form gets a new field I've gotta go tweak on it again. And managing font-size increases is a good time, too. With limited resources in a constant-change environment I think tables for forms are much easier - class it and go. Then the software engineers can add or remove things without my intervention. For the record, I use CSS for layout of everything else except tabular data and forms. I'm actually a little tired of the "experts" in the ivory tower telling me to do the subjective "right" thing and then spout off a very simple one label, one value "example" of how easy it is. Time is money and dealing with the many browser quirks resulting from complex CSS form layout isn't responsible from my perspective.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

newttyy — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:44:53 GMT

Like someone else said it before me ... excelent post.

I still use tables for the main structure of the web site and for the forms as well.

Anything else is build and position by css and images.

Here something that a lot of you might go nuts over it: I am still using div tags inside the tables and position them inside the cell using css.

Why so many people think this is wrong? I have still NOT found a browser that will not display the page corectly and fast.

I personally think that people are going way too much "banana" for the whole div tags/css thing.

Each of them have their own places and you can use them toghether as well (as long you know how to).

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WheelMUD - A C# MUD Server — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:50:48 GMT

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re: Salary negotiation in the interview process

Joe Niland — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:19:58 GMT

I've only been asked that question by recruitment agents, not directly by employers. But if I was I'd either say 'I'll let my agent deal with the salary matters' or if no agent was involved I'd say 'I don't think that's relevant, but I believe I am worth $X'. But this scenario leaves a bad taste really - the employer should make an offer based on what they think the position is worth to the company and then negotiations can go from there.

Not sure about USA but in AU and UK I am pretty sure it's a breach of the privacy act for a current employer to give that info to a new one. Either way would you really want to work for an employer who's trying to get the cheapest employee rather than the best?

re: Salary negotiation in the interview process

Jimmy — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:12:49 GMT

From the other side, don't know how it is on yours, but there is a record in my contract, which says that salary is confidential and should not be disclosed without an important reason. Is looking for a new job an important reason? I think yes, but this can be also an excuse for question you mention.

re: Salary negotiation in the interview process

Dru Sellers — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:30:17 GMT

"I am not at liberty to disclose that information." 8-D

re: Salary negotiation in the interview process

saku — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:02:24 GMT

I would say: enough.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

Christopher Bennage — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 03:52:52 GMT

The question for me is: What is the easiest to maintain? I love CSS for layout because, as Dave Thieben said, I went insane with nested tables... However, when it comes to forms, I often use tables because I find it easy to maintain. (It's rare to nest tables for a form).

I do plan to followup on the urls DonDraper mentioned. I'm always looking for a better way...

re: Mmmmm...statically typed goodness (updated)

Sam — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:03:45 GMT

I think much of your concern can be traced back to the development environment though. It's a shame to hate on JavaScript when there's really nothing making a JS String object any hard to debug than a .NET System.String. It's the environment. Firefox is a must for JS development. IE just doesn't come close (as far as I've found). It's also good to understand the basics of the language though. JS isn't your average dynamically typed language like Ruby or Python. In fact, I'm tempted to say that it's a weakly _classed_ language (for lack of a better term). JS is a Prototype based language. So where in Ruby you're likely to be dealing with an actual URI object when dealing with a URI, in JS you're dealing with a Decorated Object at best, and probably more generally a plain old String. Don't get me wrong, a Type is what it is, and that doesn't change, but fundamentally that Type is almost always Object in JS. The point is, don't like seeing "[[Object object]]" in IE? Decorate it with your own toString() method. Want Form elements to have a serialize() method? Give it to 'em. Due to browser differences static decoration is sometimes ineffective however (IE doesn't Type DOM Elements, so it doesn't work there). Is JS a great language? I dunno about that. It's a very flexible language though that you can do some really complex things with very easily that would have you writing lots of nastyness in c#. But the potential is often frustrated by browser limitations unfortunately. Plus most implementations are tremendously slow.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

DonDraper — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 04:04:38 GMT

Yeah, I'd have to say you're still in a bit of the dark ages and missing something :). Doing the forms without tables saves a lot of grief later when you have to twiddle everything around. If your form's public facing, the importance of accessibility grows with traffic (smaller file sizes don't hurt, either). Besides, with places like formassembly.com and wufoo.com around, it's braindead easy to do it the right way. I counted my last row/colspan a couple of years ago.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

dave thieben — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:08:44 GMT

Bob, I'm with ya. Like with any coding, you need to use your noggin when deciding which to use. However, having sliced up countless Photoshop files into dynamic websites, i love the CSS method for pure simplicity. I don't know how many times I almost went insane with colSpans and rowSpans and tables nested 46 deep. I also like the ability of CSS to change the style definition and completely change the layout of a site without changing one line of code.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

Bob Yexley — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:51:35 GMT

Yes, I completely agree Stephen. I use a hybrid too. I use a table to basically layout the fields and labels of my form, but usually that table ends up residing inside a div on the page, and often times also, as you mentioned, ends up having spans and divs within it as well.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

Steve — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:10:10 GMT

I like to use tables over CSS almost always. Mostly because I also like to write automation against web pages that scrape them, and it's easier for me to get the data out from a table than from Div tags.

re: Tables vs. CSS for layout of web forms

Stephen Wright — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:02:04 GMT

Excellent post.

When I'm designing the page, I end up using tables for the form. If there's anything that I would add to this would be this:

I use the table to form the base of my form layout. If there are additional properties that need to be added, I use a div inside of the td to accomplish what I need. So it's more of a hybrid table/css layout.