Talk:Web Design/Lists and Tables

Tables: tbody, tfoot, thead

I think we really need to include using <tbody>, <tfoot>, and <thead> as standard practice for making tables. It's good to get people in the habit of using them from the get-go, so that if they wish to pursue further, advanced studies in web development, they'll already be in the habit of creating tables in a more universally accessible way. I'm thinking, in particular, of JavaScript: if you create a table dynamically with the createElement() method and then insert it somewhere in the DOM, it will fail to render in Internet Explorer unless you encapsulate all of your <tr>'s inside of the aforementioned tags. By teaching people new to HTML to use these tags, we avoid that possible pitfall altogether. Plus, it is better conceptually to be able to divide tables into abstract sections (i.e. head, body, and foot) so that we can really demonstrate that they represent tabular data and are not just being used for layout purposes. Just my two cents. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.226.155.182 (talk • contribs) 08:32, 21 December 2006

Is IE not rendering because of a bug, or is there something in the spec that says it works that way? I don't think we should be teaching bug-workarounds, but if it's a violation of the spec then we should stick with the spec.

On another point, we should try to not introduce "old style" formatting, prefering CSS based formats. Historybuff 21:10, 12 January 2007 (UTC)