I think I've arrived at the end of it all. I did my entire layout on DIVs without a single table. Believe me, I tested on over 21 browsers and it was perfect. Still maintained the layout without any issues. Will I say goodbye to tables now or what Well, someone else should give it a trial and see how it works.

21 browsers? Hmmmm. Care to them at least 10?

Anyways, I am happy you have finally seen the light with respect to "close to 0%" table-less design. Why do I say "close to 0%"? Because you will still need tables for what they were originally intended for - tabular data.

Welcome to the club

Yeah!

Don't you know you can view the look of your website in more than 21 browsers? It really possible. I'll send the link later. Need to go to bed now as I've worked all night.

I know tables will still be needed for my tabulations anyway

yawa-ti-de:

21 browsers? Hmmmm. Care to them at least 10?

also interested in them too.

OmniPotens:

I think I've arrived at the end of it all. I did my entire layout on DIVs without a single table. Believe me, I tested on over 21 browsers and it was perfect. Still maintained the layout without any issues. Will I say goodbye to tables now or what Well, someone else should give it a trial and see how it works.

Divs are sweet, Infact they call me the DIVER

Though tables will surely be needed for forms.

This browser thing. why isnt there a common platform or regulation to ensure that the sites all look the same. If you use a crazy browser on my site it works fine, the problem I keep having is with mozilla. I am begining to fall inlove with CB.

You can also try IETester. you know you can bulletproof your website with pure css and make Flash irrelevant with DHTML and Javascript. that does not mean the world's most used browser IE will care about rendering your hardwork the way you want it. so as an added body armour, you can test how it renders with this free tool IETester



http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Info
ETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
New in v0.2.3 : IE8 beta 2 and Print feature !

Sample Pix

Mustay,
Actually, I have a table-less solution for your forms - fieldsets

Basking,
There is a common platform. It's called W3C standards. Unfortunately, not all (and in particular, IE) browsers follow it. If you think it is bad now, I can assure you that it was worse during the dot com boom. Per browsers you love, I think you should actually love mozilla - that follows web standards more closely than the rest. I for one code in mozilla then unit test in IE.

Hey, here is the link. My phone has rang me up thrice so let put the link here and sleep off again. You can test your website looks in as many browsers as you want. Enjoy!

One last thing, forget about tables, just resort to DIVs and you are safe. It gives no shit to whatever browser you are working with. All standards remain loyal to it

http://www.browsershots.org/

omni,

i knew u were going to go there with respect to browsershots so I already crammed my response in anticipation of it

Just get your stuff to work on IE6+ and FF then do a spot check on Safari and you should be good to go. I can tell you from experience that thatz all I do and so far, so good for sites I have worked on.

tell me about it Yawa.

Actually, what I do for neatness is to combine the field sets and tables


So you get a layout like this:

-------------------------------------------------------------------Fieldset--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



[center]
table inserted for forms
[/center]


-------------------------------------------------------------------ends Fieldset--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yawa-ti-de:

Per browsers you love, I think you should actually love mozilla - that follows web standards more closely than the rest. I for one code in mozilla then unit test in IE.

This is what I referred to on Page one of this thread. I test first on FF; get happy with it but unfortunately once itz tested on IE, na another readjustment matter.

@Mustay
Have u ever designed forms in table and validated ur XHTML? Do try it (http://validome.org, http://validator.w3.org/) and see you get.
For proper form design, you may need to go the fieldset and label way - with CSS to give it the good look. Here is a link to a prototype to give you a quick start: http://woork..com/2008/06/clean-and-pure-css-form-design.html

here here kehers,

labels and fieldsets all the way. I always float the labels left and put a break after each input field

@Yawa
Had problems with breaks when validating a mobile site So, I float d label left, set input display to block in Css

Just validated one some hours ago

kehers,

wat else do u expect from a device with very little real estate play with?

By the way, mobile devices are supposed to render pages as though you had style sheets turned off. This is where semantic markup comes in as users can see pages, hopefully, arranged such that it makes sense, which is why use of tables for layout isn't good.

So I wouldn't worry about the issue. As long as it shows up properly on screen.

Hey, just woke up now since morning  
Thanks for all still posting here. Now I really know you do understand the issues behind this browser stuff. Mine is solved. Just make use of DIVs for your layout. As for the form stuff, Mustay, I'll try my stuff just the way you preach here to see what results I get. I'm used to going the Yawa's way.

@mustay
Wats d gist? Does d fieldset/table collabo works - I mean validates?

kehers

wat do u mean by "validate"? I guess this is where I am lost. If you are asking if your XHTML validates, as long as you are using a maximum of xhtml-transitional as your doctype, I don't see why it wouldn't.

If the above isn't wat you mean, pls elaborate.

Thanks,

@ www.w3.org

In other to meet our view of 2020 we need to really look into technology, government should work together with the minister of Education to introduce the use of computer from the craddle to higher instituition because it makes work easy, fast and effecient.

@yawa
I do love to see/knw how tns go in the strict mode. Just want to knw if dat wil pass d strict mode test

@chi~
??

"Vision 2020" should start with the visionaries themselves

In fact, that's an issue for another day

kehers
what is tns?

chiwa
I think for any part of Vision2020 to have any chance of success, we first and foremost need to have 24 hour power supply. Why? Because computers for one run on it

first I would check in Linux - Firefox, because you can't expect the same fonts available across different platforms

@yawa
No mind me. Run mostly on phone so I'm used to shortening words. Tns - things

From experience, I stay away from strict mode as there is a lot that goes into it. I prefer, and call me a coward, transitional

Here are some things you have to look out for in strict mode:
1) Instead of saying, "<input type="checkbox" checked />, you say, "<input type="checkbox" checked="checked" />. Same applies to disabled="disabled" and "selected="selected"

2) I believe, but don't quote me on this, that you can not use tables whatsoever

As I said, I prefer transitional. One more thing, just be aware that what we have are standards and not "do this and you will be sentenced to death by firing squad" rules. At the end of the day, it is good you adhere to them. Having said that, you have to weigh ideal vs practical.

Thanks,

I prefer strict mode. It is a better choice for me. I make use of transitional though not not as often as I use strict.

Hmmm, this made me remember my over 2 years blog post on my experience with strict and transitional mode: http://allnotes..com/2006/09/standards-and-versions-where-we.html.
The strict mode is truly hard. Between me and u, I rarely validate personal sites . But then, you never can tell when it will be needed - public jobs for example. The XHTML MP (Mobile profile - for mobile phones) for example runs in strict mode - and if you are unlucky, it MAY not work if it doesnt validate.
Really, once the 5 basic rules are followed, you are on the safe side
- Tags Must Be Closed Properly
- Tags and Attributes Must Be in Lowercase
- Value of Attributes Must Be Enclosed within Quotation Marks
- No Attribute Minimization is Allowed
- Tags Must Be Nested Properly
The only other big part you may have problems with is forms - forms are really a bottleneck.

Ran into this a while ago: www.giveupandusetables.com Really funny

LOL,

Yeah, pretty damn funny. The 47 minutes though, hmmmm.

I've learnt alot from this thread. I never knew it will get very interesting like this. I'm also getting to learn those who really know what they are up to in this section of the forum