Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:10:48 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T19595, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 17595 - Don't use <table> for page layout
Don't use <table> for page layout
Status: NEW
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Special pages (Other open bugs)
1.15.x
All All
: Low enhancement (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
http://radioscanningtw.jidanni.org/in...
:
: 8234 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2009-02-21 04:20 UTC by Dan Jacobson
Modified: 2011-04-14 15:10 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Dan Jacobson 2009-02-21 04:20:27 UTC
Allow me to call into question, and perhaps leave here as a long term
goal, MediaWiki's use of <table> for page layout, in pages like
Special:Allpages.

You are making assumptions about the user's device dimensions!

Please use stylesheets etc.
Comment 1 Dan Jacobson 2009-02-28 00:17:39 UTC
...old fashioned and obsolete inline and table styles instead of CSS. If your site is still laid out with tables -
WAKE UP! It means that your site’s layout is at least 5 years old and in the web and Internet world, it’s more like 50 years out of fashion. Your site is a ball and chain on the Internet...

Seen in http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/26/site-optimization-optimizing-bandwidth-and-cleaning-out-the-code-closet/
Also see
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Styling_for_Mobile
Comment 2 Niklas Laxström 2009-02-28 16:32:31 UTC
Special:Allpages looks like tabular data for me. I see no reason to change unless someone creates nice solution that works with all browsers.
Comment 3 Raimond Spekking 2009-02-28 16:45:05 UTC
Nice to read:

Håkon Wium Lie, CTO Opera Software: Wikipedia’s markup: a case study, http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
Comment 4 Dan Jacobson 2009-02-28 18:04:25 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Special:Allpages looks like tabular data for me.

Ihe above URL,
http://radioscanningtw.jidanni.org/index.php?title=Special:Allpages
is _not_ tabular data.

All it is is
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

There is no relation between columns 1, 2, and 3.

Maybe you are thinking about Wikipedia's Special:Allpages, but that is
a special case, not a general MediaWiki case of Special:Allpages.

With the obsolete hardwired tables design, one cannot browse:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

or

1 2
3 4
5 6

or

1
2
3
4

All I know is you're wrong about it being tabular data.
(But I don't know or use CSS so don't know what the
modern redesign should be.)
Comment 5 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2009-03-05 23:36:07 UTC
I don't know of any way to do this that works in IE and doesn't require you to specify a fixed width.  I don't think we want to degrade display for the majority of our users for the sake of a minority, even a more standards-compliant-browser-using minority.

I guess we could do inline-blocks with a fixed width and rely on wrapping within each block.  I think that would work.  At least Firefox 2 doesn't support inline-block, so we might have to use floats for it instead, and specify both width and height or something (which would get pretty messed up for long page titles).

Overall, this is nontrivial to do until we can rely on CSS column-*, which (surprise!) IE doesn't support, up to and including IE8.
Comment 6 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2009-03-05 23:37:36 UTC
. . . but if anyone has any ideas, feel free to submit a patch.  Any proposal must work in IE6 and later, as well as any other significant browsers.
Comment 8 Dan Jacobson 2009-03-30 00:57:26 UTC
*** Bug 8234 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links