Christian Ziebarth

Posts Tagged ‘forms’

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Tables and Forms

In Uncategorized on May 18, 2009 at 11:39 pm

In my prior entry entitled Tables vs. Tables I reminded us all, myself included, that the W3C says that web authors are allowed to use HTML tables to lay out forms. This flies in the face of much conventional “wisdom” that says HTML tables are never to be used for anything. But it struck me not too long ago that forms really ARE tables that are simply waiting for some of their data to be filled in.

Allow me to illustrate. Here is a simple table that I don’t think anyone would argue really is a table:

Example #1

Table

First Name: Donald
Last Name: Duck
Address: 1313 Duck Lane
Occupation: Sailor
Girlfriend: Daisy

Example #2

Form

Now, what if we remove half the information, leave half the information, and wait for a user (Donald Duck, presumably) to fill in the remaining half: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tables vs. Tables

In Uncategorized on February 3, 2009 at 6:34 pm

You’ve heard of Spy vs. Spy and Kramer vs. Kramer and Godzilla vs. Rodan. But have you ever heard of Tables vs. Tables?

I am surprised that in 2009 there are still people in the web development world who don’t understand the proper use of HTML tables.

With the economy the way it is I have a trickle of freelance web development work but still need to land a full time gig. I contact many companies about jobs they have posted but rarely get any sort of response. A few days ago I actually received a response from one company that may shed some light on what other, non-responding companies could be thinking. After this company checked my resume online they wrote back and said:

We cannot accept you as a developer because we found a TABLE tag in your markup on your page at: tccnotary.com

Read the rest of this entry »

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A Dash of Progressive Enhancement

In Uncategorized on January 27, 2009 at 5:34 pm

Here’s a little example of spicing up forms a bit with minimal effort. A recent project I did was for a notary company (TCC Notary). Most of the pages on their site had forms that could easily be broken down into logical fieldset groupings.

Each box looked fine on its own but when you stacked them up their “boxiness” really came through. I started by giving the first fieldset on each page a non-repeating background image set to appear in the lower right corner. The image is the gray “TCC.” Any fieldset between the first and the last one is a normal, squared-off box, while the last fieldset on each page has a rounded lower right corner: Read the rest of this entry »