Tableless!! Css!!

[dhn]

Check out http://forums.tolkienonline.com for a pure tableless version of phpbb.

It is possible. We did it.

Ted Tschopp

Hi Ted, I am huge fan of tolkienonline, and I did spend a lot of time browsing the forums over the last three years. It was great to see you move over to phpbb and I really enjoy what you are doing with the templates.

[singletrack]

Nice job Ted. Overall it looks great, I did find a few validation errors. Try using :

http://validator.w3.org/" target="_blank

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/" target="_blank

There are just a couple of errors that you could easily fix and then it would be completely valid HTML and CSS. I'd be interested in hearing what problems/hurdles you ran into getting that done.

[TedTschopp]

We are aware of the validation issues, and plan on cleaning it all up. This will roll into our next release. One thing we are going to also do is start to adopt a standard naming convention for the styles so that people can apply their own style sheets on their local box.

So for example we are thinking about styling everything with a unique phpbb style name as well as a Tolkien Online unique style name. This way if others take our templates and use them the person can have their own style apply to the other phpbb sites or not as they so choose. Basically we want a person on their end to be able to change the style to their liking. We have several people on our site which are color blind or vision impaired, and designing a style they can load onto their own computer to change the look of the forums to allow them to view the site will be a huge advantage. We also want to give people the ability to turn certain features off (signatures, signature pictures, emoticons, etc... you get the idea) with local style sheets.

As for challanges, Jonathan, the guy I work on the site with did most of the coding for version 1, should be the one to answer that. I guess I'll be able to answer in a couple of months becuase I want to do the version 2 of the style sheet and forum redesign. We are looking at using 2.2 to do it.

[crxgames]

I have been thinking of making a tableless template for 2.0.11, but with the beta of 2.2 due within a month or so, it would be a waste, myabe I will for 2.2 when it is officially released.

It would take weeks and a heck of a massive css file though.

[Not Radio]

In my experience, I found tables to be much more dependable and resilient then cascading style sheets, although there is quite a lot of room for improvement in the form. I could cut the current HTML code in half, but I don’t know how it would impact the current template.

Tables and CSS don't relate that way at all. Rather, one modifies the other. The table markup should only specify the vague structure of the data being tabulated. CSS is designed to place aesthetic specifications in one place so as to eliminate the use of redundant attributes.

[graphic]

You can keep all your design in css and still use tables. Tables just serve a different purpose than div tags, for example displaying rows and columns of data.

[TedTschopp]

You can keep all your design in css and still use tables. Tables just serve a different purpose than div tags, for example displaying rows and columns of data.

I think what we should be discussing is that should message board messages be considered tabled data or not.

Regardless of how hard it is to convert to Tableless CSS. I know we converted to cut bandwidth costs. Which we did in spades. So for us the decision wasn't about anything other than money and personal ability to do it.

Ted Tschopp