Concerns - Table layout, iFrames, code deprecation - html

I am working with a simple table-based layout that uses iFrames as depicted in the example below. This code is rendering well in all modern browsers. The iFrames are usually filled with long tables of data, but there is no odd behavior or clipping.
My concern is that it LOOKS like a really bad hack to me. Table-based layout evils aside, should I be worried about deprecation of all the width="100%" height="100%" attributes to HTML and iFrame tags?
I know that CSS can do most, if not all of this, but I don't want to use float hacks and I haven't been able to nail anything down that works in all modern browsers.
To be clear, I am looking for opinions and suggestions as to whether this solution is adequate for the next few years, or whether I should go ahead and delve into CSS hacks.
Thank you for any feedback.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
html, body
{
height: 100%;
margin: 0px;
}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" height="100%">
<tr>
<td colspan="2"><div align="center">This is the header.</div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="100%">
<iFrame src="pane1.php" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</td>
<td height="100%">
<iFrame src="pane2.php" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">This is the footer.</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

I don't see anything that's going to be removed from any browser in the next few (or several) years.
The table tag is a valid and needed set of tags. Without it, there's no way to display tabular data.
What happened was people started exploiting it to display very intricate layouts which ended up being impossible to maintain.
No one's going to shoot you for using tables in the fashion you're using. It's super simple, and does the job whily you're developing, so consider it simply an iteration. Iterative development is good. Once you figure out a CSS-based layout, the code here is simple enough to replace.

It would probably be best to move to css styles if you are concerned about deprecation. You can still use the table layout if you are more comfortable though I prefer floating divs.

To my knowledge, there is no danger of the tag becoming deprecated.
And I have it from a very good source!
see Are IFrames (HTML) obsolete?

Deprecation means that the features will not be present in future version of (X)HTML. So far all the browsers are supporting old versions of HTML, but I wouldn't rely on that myself.
All of what you're doing and much more can be done with CSS, without using hacks. Going through the exercise will help you maintain relevant skills. The page you have right now takes two extra HTTP requests to display; whether this is a concern depends how many people are requesting the page.

Related

How I place 3 links in the same line on HTML without using CSS

I need to put 3 links in the same line aligned like left, center, and right without using CSS.
Its something like this, I hope this helps
If you really want to do all of this without using any CSS, you can use tables.
<table>
<tr>
<td>First link</td>
<td>Second link</td>
<td>Third link</td>
</tr>
</table>
Otherwise you don't really have much of an option if you want the spacing and all you got on your image example. I would also not recommend using tables all that much, because pretty much everything should be responsive for mobile devices these days, and tables are really hard to fit in to a 320px of screen width.
This is extremely bad practice. A list of links is not tabular data. HTML is not a layout tool. This is how things were done in 1996. The web is better (in some ways) now and we do not do things this way now.
It is possible to hack a layout with a table and obsolete presentational attributes. The data is not tabular, however, so this is bad food for screen readers and search engines.
It is also not HTML 5. What you want to achieve is not possible with HTML 5. This is HTML 4.01 Transitional which, when it was released two decades ago, was only ever intended as a stop-gap while people converted over to using CSS for presentation.
<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="33%">A link</td>
<td width="34%" align=center>A link</td>
<td width="33%" align=right>A link</td>
</tr>
</table>
assuming you can add inline styling ,you can use this
<div>
<a href="" >firstlink</a>
<a href="" style ="text-align: center;
width: 90%;
display: inline-block;
margin: auto;">secondlink</a>
<a href="" >thirdlink</a>
</div>
else you can use one by answered by community wiki

td stacking without using css

Our CRM allows us to send automatic emails to our customers using their software. Things like purchase receipts and so forth. While they offer HTML editing of the emails, it's heavily restricted and we may not use any CSS.
As far as what their style guide does allow, it appears to be all HTML and some inline styling, for example:
<span style="color:#ffffff">white</span>
<div style="color:#ffffff">
<img src="dickbutt.gif" style="width:30px;height:20px">
...are all OK according to the guide. However, no other CSS or CSS references are allowed, including:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/stylesheet.css" type="text/css">
or
<style type="text/css">
#import "/stylesheet.css";
</style>
or
<style type="text/css">
body { color:green; }
</style>
To add insult to injury, and I should have included this above, everything above the <body> tag (and including the body tag itself) is stripped out upon saving the file in their in-software HTML editor. They have some kind of auto-code modification scripts that reference the "approved" code in their style guide, and strips what's left. So what am I left with? Not much at all. Basically from between opening <table> to the closing </table>. They even strip out </body> and </html>.
With the remaining code, I'm unable to use #media at all or allow any <td> stacking. So, are their any alternate ways of linking to a style sheet you know about? ...a method that will allow stacking without access to CSS? I'm basically looking for a way to make these emails responsive under the restrictions outlined above.
I uploaded the style guide to JSfiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/Lxfqus7f
Yes, yes 100 times yes. Everyone who has ever designed an email template has had the same complaints. Email design is Web design circa 1999. First off just forget CSS references just inline everything you can and do not bother with #media tags, forget they even exist.
Table Design
Think of a <table> as a spreadsheet, a <tr> as a table row, and a <td> as a table cell. Instead of "stacking" TDs try nesting tables. A new table can go inside a TD and in a sort of Matryoshka doll style fashion you can make any layout you want.
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<table>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
</table>
The above works fine.
Responsive emails
The words responsive and email do not normally go together. What email clients render is severely limited but there are ways to work around it. Like setting your Master Table's width to 100% and having two TDs on each side. Like this:
<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr height="500px" valign="top">
<td width="*" bgcolor="#00FFFF"> </td>
<td width="550px" bgcolor="#FF0000"> <center><br><br> <H1>Body</h1> </center> </td>
<td width="*" bgcolor="#00FFFF"> </td>
</tr>
</table>
Here are both examples in a JSfiddle.
http://jsfiddle.net/e8r9ky4x/
Looks like your style guide includes the use of some inline styles:
<p>Our studio is <span style="color:purple">purple.</span></p>
Define sections of text that require different HTML <div>
<div style="color:#FC8301">
<h3>This title.</h3>
<p>This is sentence.</p>
</div>
Since you're automatically generating emails anyway, why not just let this one slide and declare your styles in variables and use them where appropriate?
Are they stripping out all style tags? Could you just put a style hidden at the begginning of a TD?
<td><style>/*rules are for quitters!*/</style>Stuff</td>
Using a style tag in the body may not be the best of things to use and may even induce vomiting in many web developers, but it IS a possibility to utilize in Email.
I would strongly recommend not to use it this way outside of cases like you have listed, and would recommend HEAVY testing across all clients as it can sometimes cause buggy results.
I would look to make your inline styling do most of the heavy lifting and just use the style tags in body for items that cannot be done any other way.
Below is some good resources on Responsive HTML email made to work on GMAIL APP (which strips the style tag almost completely) and should help give you a baseline on best way to create your emails.
Hybrid coding approach - http://labs.actionrocket.co/the-hybrid-coding-approach
Hybrid coding redux - http://labs.actionrocket.co/the-hybrid-coding-approach-2
Is Hybrid right option - http://labs.actionrocket.co/hybrid-is-the-answer-is-it-the-right-question

Is that navigation bar negative for SEO

I'm doing some SEO for a website I haven't built and it has this navigation bar:
<div align="right" id="menu">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td><div align="center" class="menuitem1" onmouseover="this.className='menuitem1a'" onmouseout="this.className='menuitem1'" onclick="window.location='index.php'" >
<div style="margin-top:80px">Profile</div>
</div></td>
<td><div align="center" class="menuitem2" onmouseover="this.className='menuitem2a'" onmouseout="this.className='menuitem2'" onclick="window.location='customers.php'">
<div style="margin-top:80px">Customers</div>
</div></td>
<td><div align="center" class="menuitem3c">
<div style="margin-top:80px">Services</div>
</div></td>
<td><div align="center" class="menuitem4" onmouseover="this.className='menuitem4a'" onmouseout="this.className='menuitem4'" onclick="window.location='products.php'">
<div style="margin-top:80px">Products</div>
</div></td>
<td><div align="center" class="menuitem5" onmouseover="this.className='menuitem5a'" onmouseout="this.className='menuitem5'" onclick="window.location='contact.php'">
<div style="margin-top:80px">Contact</div>
</div></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
First thing I noticed, it has no anchors!
Second when I made a sitemap of the website only index page was there.
EDIT:It also spits errors on evaluation!
Does this nave a negative impact from SEO perspective?
Thanks in advance!
Yes it does. Since the JS is usually ignored by the crawler, it can't get to the rest of the pages because the navigation will not work for it. You need to change those DIVs to anchors and style them appropriately to retain the old style.
Also, this method isn't very accessible either since it's not obvious from the page content which of the elements are links. Never mind semantics
Google supposedly can follow JS nowadays, but yea, that's atrocious markup. Also really bad for accessibility. And just plain hard to maintain. Plus, it has way more markup than needed, and google never complains if you lighten your page sizes.
As for validation, that probably doesn't have that much impact on SEO (if it did, half of Google's index would be empty).
My guess is that's Adobe Dreamweaver markup circa 2000 or it's coming out of a typically bad CMS.
#JohnP already answers the question - this is really bad markup.
A simpler approach would be
<ul id="menu">
<li>Profile</li>
<li>Customers</li>
....
</ul>
and doing the styling via CSS. (You may need to add the menuitem1, menuitem2 classes to the <li> elements if they are differently styled.)

HTML fixed header table scrollbar [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
HTML table with fixed headers?
I've tried several methods to get a scroll bar from an HTML table with a fixed header but had no luck. I think I need a solution where the header is somehow "attached" to the table body (rather than the typical nested table solution). Every solution I tried messes up the width of the header columns and the body columns. In other words they get out of synch and the columns of the header don't line up properly with those of the scrolling table. The widths of the headers and the columns vary from column to column.
Is there any way for me to achieve this? I'd rather not use JavaScript. Oh and I need this to work in Internet Explorer as well.
Update: It is pretty important for me to get this functionality. I need the fixed header for both column and row headers. So far no solution has worked properly. I considered making the headers separate tables, but this wouldn't work when scrolling since the headers would stay fixed.
It seems like there would be many use cases for fixed HTML headers so it is surprising to me that there is no adequate solution.
(Oh, and I tried the option suggested by opatut in the link, but it doesn't work in all browsers and I need this work in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. If it doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6 that's OK).
Oh, and if I must fix the column widths or row heights, that's OK too, I would just be glad to have a working fixed header HTML table (cross-browser).
I have a solution which is a pure CSS solution and allows the table to be normal and variable width. This is a new solution and has some issues depending on the design of your headers. The good news is that if your headers are left-aligned, or your columns are fixed width, it should be fine. There are some visual bugs in IE6, and I've found that some cells need a min-width to keep the headers showing if the content in the column is less wide then the header. All the issues are visual, so if it looks good you're done. The table body is totally normal, and since there's no JavaScript you don't have to do anything if the user re-sizes the page.
Check out my solution and leave me a comment
http://salzerdesign.com/blog/?p=191
I know you're trying to avoid Javascript, but I was in exactly the same boat as you (struggling with what to do for days on the exact challenge for a new application) and solved the problem in about 10 minutes once I found Datatables:
Working example of a solution: http://www.datatables.net/examples/basic_init/scroll_y.html
It EXACTLY matches header and body columns width-wise every time. Widths can be specified, but it's also intelligent enough to auto size. Column highlighting and sorting is supported by default using the provided sample CSS. Switching to a paginated model (what I ended up using) is a single line of code. And....the best part--if you're concerned that your user might not have Javascript turned on, it degrades perfectly back to standards-compliant HTML tables. IMHO, it's the least painful, most feature rich solution out there that fully supports IE.
If it makes you feel any better, I've used this solution on both a government (military) site and an international bank's websites....both the most demanding and strictest customers I've ever come across...and both were extremely happy with the results.
My first answer didn't attempt to fix both headers and columns. Here's an example that should work in all typical browsers (but it may need some tweaking).
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<style>
th { text-align: center; border: 1px solid black; padding:3px; }
td { text-align: center; border: 1px solid black; padding:3px; }
th.c1, td.c1 { width: 100px; }
th.c2, td.c2 { width: 150px; }
th.c3, td.c3 { width: 60px; }
th.c4, td.c4 { width: 100px; }
th.c5, td.c5 { width: 150px; }
th.c6, td.c6 { width: 60px; }
#rowScroll { height: 100px; } /* Subtract the scrollbar height */
#contentScroll { height: 100px; width: 300px; }
#colScroll { width: 272px; } /* Subtract the scrollbar width */
</style>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="float: left;" style="width:300px; height:100px;" >
<tr>
<td id="void" style="border: 0;">
</td>
<td id="rowHeaders" style="border: 0;">
<div id="colScroll" style="overflow-x:hidden;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width: 600px;">
<tr>
<th class="c1">A</th>
<th class="c2">B</th>
<th class="c3">C</th>
<th class="c4">D</th>
<th class="c5">E</th>
<th class="c6">F</th>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="colHeaders" style="border: 0;">
<div id="rowScroll" style="overflow-y:hidden">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr><td>R1</td></tr>
<tr><td>R2</td></tr>
<tr><td>R3</td></tr>
<tr><td>R4</td></tr>
<tr><td>R5</td></tr>
<tr><td>R6</td></tr>
<tr><td>R7</td></tr>
<tr><td>R8</td></tr>
<tr><td>R9</td></tr>
</table>
</div>
</td>
<td id="content" style="border: 0;">
<div id="contentScroll" style="overflow:auto">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width: 600px;">
<tr><td class="c1">A1</td><td class="c2">B1</td><td class="c3">C1</td><td class="c4">D1</td><td class="c5">E1</td><td class="c6">F1</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A2</td><td class="c2">B2</td><td class="c3">C2</td><td class="c4">D2</td><td class="c5">E2</td><td class="c6">F2</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A3</td><td class="c2">B3</td><td class="c3">C3</td><td class="c4">D3</td><td class="c5">E3</td><td class="c6">F3</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A4</td><td class="c2">B4</td><td class="c3">C4</td><td class="c4">D4</td><td class="c5">E4</td><td class="c6">F4</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A5</td><td class="c2">B5</td><td class="c3">C5</td><td class="c4">D5</td><td class="c5">E5</td><td class="c6">F5</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A6</td><td class="c2">B6</td><td class="c3">C6</td><td class="c4">D6</td><td class="c5">E6</td><td class="c6">F6</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A7</td><td class="c2">B7</td><td class="c3">C7</td><td class="c4">D7</td><td class="c5">E7</td><td class="c6">F7</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A8</td><td class="c2">B8</td><td class="c3">C8</td><td class="c4">D8</td><td class="c5">E8</td><td class="c6">F8</td></tr>
<tr><td class="c1">A9</td><td class="c2">B9</td><td class="c3">C9</td><td class="c4">D9</td><td class="c5">E9</td><td class="c6">F9</td></tr>
</table>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<script src="../js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var content = $("#contentScroll");
var headers = $("#colScroll");
var rows = $("#rowScroll");
content.scroll(function () {
headers.scrollLeft(content.scrollLeft());
rows.scrollTop(content.scrollTop());
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Try my solution, it's bug free and optimized for performance (not sacrificing functionality):
http://code.google.com/p/js-scroll-table-header/
If you try it and need any help, just ask, I'm the author.
It's a bit too much code to put in here directly, but what it comes down to is, at minimum, you'll need some hefty CSS for this. Using javascript and jQuery can lighten that, so I'll include links to both methods.
HTML + CSS Only
You can use the source on this page to copy an example of how you can do exactly what you're asking via CSS and HTML. This is reported as working in pretty much all current browsers (Opera 7.x + (All Platforms), Mozilla 1.x + (All Platforms), IE 6.x + (Windows), Safari 1.x + (MacOS), Konqueror 3.x + (Linux / BSD)), but if you have to go back to IE 5.x, it starts to fail.
Javascript/jQuery
If you decide that you're open to including Javascript and jQuery, there's a second option that looks a bit simpler to implement: this blog article shows how.
All I've found need fixed values for cell width and height, so if you want to keep it dynamic you're stuck with JavaScript.
One solution I like is this one, but you need to define a width for each colum. » Fixed headers in large HTML tables at The Code Project.
If you don't want to use JavaScript, maybe you can set the fixed column widths with PHP. I would determine the average string length of the cells to get the column width:
column_width = column_average / (all_cells_average * column_count) * table_width
You can use DataTables without JavaScript. It won't have sorting but the table, headers and divs that are hosting them will work. Just look at the page source - it has 3 divs each with a table with identical widths in thead. Top and bottom just provide header and footer and the one in the middle provides data. It's actually pretty close to your original idea that you need to heep these parts separated.

Html newsletter in gmail

Im coding html newsletter and faced up with strange thing in gmail. Code:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="700" height="122">
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="3" width="689" height="8"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_top_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="12" height="106"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_left_border.gif"></td>
<td valign="top" height="106" width="689">
some content
</td>
<td valign="top" width="12" height="106"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_right_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="3" width="689" height="8"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_bot_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
</table>
Gmail screenshot:
Screenshot from other email clients:
Any hints?
Your help would be appreciated.
It's a browser issue. When you put an image inside a table, the image should be an inline element, sitting on a text line. That means there will be space below it (for parts of a line of text that go below the baseline, ie. descenders) and GMail's rendering is ‘correct’.
However, in Quirks mode, as well as “almost standards” mode, an image that is alone in a cell behaves like a block instead of an inline element, so it doesn't get the extra spacing. It looks like the ‘other’ client is in Quirks mode, as it has reset the font size inside the table (a typical Quirks mode bug).
Normally you want to avoid Quirks mode at all costs, so you'd use Standards mode and fix up the img-in-table problem by setting CSS display: block or vertical-align:-anything-but-baseline on the <img> elements, or, better, dump the ugly layout-table and use some background images instead. However of course in a e-mail context your opportunities for styling are strictly limited.
So yeah, try setting style="display: block" on the images to try to make them display the same in Quirks vs Standards if you like, but be aware that this is the least of your problems when dealing with HTML mail. You will face much, much worse breakages than that. HTML e-mail completely sucks on every level; if you have any chance to get out of it, by just mailing a link to a proper web page, then do that.
In regard to the change of fonts, it somewhat seems like the 'other client' might show a non-HTML body and I think gmail supports HTML by default.
Have you set the content-data to be HTML?
For instance in c# you might need to set:
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
mail.IsBodyHtml = true;