Tables and Table-less Design
This comes to mind because I’m wading through PHP code breaking down the table-based output someone else has written into non-table-dependent code. It gave me a chance to think about the consequences of table-driven design.
The first consequence is invalid code. The particular system I was working with held an XHTML doctype on the output page, yet insisted on using table attributes that were not valid for XHTML. Tables are the Old World, and so the techniques don’t carry well into the new.
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