tables, simplicity, and fashion
Feb. 25th, 2011 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eTables inside html are very useful, though they are insanely over-used for quite pointless frills that get called "aesthetics".
If you want to present a list of data in rows and columns tables are absolutely necessary. [Oops. I just knew a sweeping statement like that would be a mistake. See Bob's reply at http://miriam-e.livejournal.com/276983.html ] I've always felt they were rather too complicated however.
put as many cells of data on that row as you want then close the row with
Now you can add another row with data in it the same way, until finally...
That's a simple table without lots of formatting options, but even at its simplest it is uncomfortably verbose. Consider laying out a table with, say 20 cells in a row and twice that number of rows. You'd be crazy to enter it by hand.
I don't understand why the designers of html didn't allow for the oldest, simple-text table format of all -- comma-separated values often abbreviated to csv. All spreadsheets and databases provide it as a format for loading or saving data. This would have made life a hell of a lot simpler for us all and would have made pasting in of table data way easier. It might have looked like this:
row-1 cell 1, cell 2, cell 3, cell4
row-2 cell 1, cell 2, cell 3, cell4
How much more compact and readable is that!
A pity. A missed opportunity. I doubt that html will ever take up something like that which so simplifies things, as sadly the trend now is to make it more and more complex. Even cascading stylesheets (css), which held such great potential for simplifying html, have been used to make pages far more complex than they need be. Take a peek at any wikipedia page nowadays. You often find that there is more formatting information than actual page information... and you wondered why their pages load slowly. I love Wikipedia, but I hate that they've allowed the advocates of pointless complexity to rule their formatting. But while Wikipedia are bad offenders in over-complication, have a look at the source code of any large company's pages these days. More often than not, you'll find their pages are just drowning in excessive formatting and javascript, and even worse, flash.
Will we ever pull back from this era of pointless frills? It feels to me like our version of the insane fashions the Elizabethans indulged in: big, decorative buckles on shoes; giant, powdered wigs perched atop shaved heads, enormous ruffles surrounding necks, lace and jewelry everywhere, absurd gargantuan dresses with hoops to hold them out and whalebone corsets to constrict waistlines to dangerous narrowness... That time was just nuts! Fashion went completely out of control, forcing people to become more and more excessive. I fear we are beginning to do the same thing with our webpages.
If you want to present a list of data in rows and columns tables are absolutely necessary. [Oops. I just knew a sweeping statement like that would be a mistake. See Bob's reply at http://miriam-e.livejournal.com/276983.html ] I've always felt they were rather too complicated however.
<table> to start the table<tr> to begin a table row<td> to begin a cell of table data </td> to end the cell of dataput as many cells of data on that row as you want then close the row with
</tr>Now you can add another row with data in it the same way, until finally...
</table> you close the table.That's a simple table without lots of formatting options, but even at its simplest it is uncomfortably verbose. Consider laying out a table with, say 20 cells in a row and twice that number of rows. You'd be crazy to enter it by hand.
I don't understand why the designers of html didn't allow for the oldest, simple-text table format of all -- comma-separated values often abbreviated to csv. All spreadsheets and databases provide it as a format for loading or saving data. This would have made life a hell of a lot simpler for us all and would have made pasting in of table data way easier. It might have looked like this:
<table format="csv"> begin the tablerow-1 cell 1, cell 2, cell 3, cell4
row-2 cell 1, cell 2, cell 3, cell4
</table> close the table.How much more compact and readable is that!
A pity. A missed opportunity. I doubt that html will ever take up something like that which so simplifies things, as sadly the trend now is to make it more and more complex. Even cascading stylesheets (css), which held such great potential for simplifying html, have been used to make pages far more complex than they need be. Take a peek at any wikipedia page nowadays. You often find that there is more formatting information than actual page information... and you wondered why their pages load slowly. I love Wikipedia, but I hate that they've allowed the advocates of pointless complexity to rule their formatting. But while Wikipedia are bad offenders in over-complication, have a look at the source code of any large company's pages these days. More often than not, you'll find their pages are just drowning in excessive formatting and javascript, and even worse, flash.
Will we ever pull back from this era of pointless frills? It feels to me like our version of the insane fashions the Elizabethans indulged in: big, decorative buckles on shoes; giant, powdered wigs perched atop shaved heads, enormous ruffles surrounding necks, lace and jewelry everywhere, absurd gargantuan dresses with hoops to hold them out and whalebone corsets to constrict waistlines to dangerous narrowness... That time was just nuts! Fashion went completely out of control, forcing people to become more and more excessive. I fear we are beginning to do the same thing with our webpages.