frames or tables

[shadowsword232]

i'm making a site for my youth group and i've written the site using frames and we should have a server for it i a week or so. i was wondering whether people here prefer tables or frames. i personaly can use either so i don't really care

[Paul Jr]

Hey, there should be an “Other” option! Using tables for layout is not a good thing, and frames aren’t too good either. I prefer good ol’ HTML and CSS.

[MstrBob]

Good god, you don't mean you actually use tables for layout? What sense does that make? Tables are meant to define tabular data. Just like <p> means there's a paragraph, <h1> means there's a header, and <ul> means an unordered list. And frames should always be avoided. They're not search engine friendly, they're not friendly for smaller devices, for the disabled, and they're not your average user-friendly. Plus, Server Side Includes (http://www.smartwebby.com/web_site_design/server_side_includes.asp) are much more efficient and make maintanance easy.

You're other option should be CSS (http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp) Cascading Style Sheets are how you should be doing everything: colors, size, layout, ect. HTML 4.01 transitional is old and depreceated. It makes no sense to use.

[PeOfEo]

So in a nut shell the correct answer is neither: Do not use frames or tables.

www.bluerobot.com has some rudimentary examples of how one can layout a website with css.

www.w3schools.com has some good stuff to learn the css syntax.

Couple css with clean accessible semantic markup* and you are golden.


*what I mean by this is use the appropriet stuff. If you want a paragraph use the <p> element, for a navigation, which is affectivly a list of links, use the unordered list, for a heading use the <h#> tags, so on and so fourth.

[shadowsword232]

thnx. most of what i learned i got out of web page design class and so i didn't know there was an alternative to frames.