CustomerService
07-08-2007, 12:45 PM
I have been following talk at vBulletin.com and it seems like there is going to be a push toward standards compliance. While vBulletin's code validates against xHTML1, the specification is that tables are only to be used for tabular data. vBulletin uses it for layout.
vBulletin has always not only relied heavily on tables for layout, but heavily defended it as well. Floris, in a grand cop out shifting responsibility to their customer base, had issued a challenge quite a long time ago that says, in summary "if you think it can be done, do it, and these are the rules". He is likely right in that vBulletin cannot currently support itself without any tables, but I think few if any developers, or anyone at vBulletin for that matter, would disagree that vBulletin can get rid of a massive amount of them. Here at ForumMonkeys, most of our skins skim a good number of tables off the markup and some skins actually take a considerable chunk - so the proof is in the pudding. Wayne at vBulletin is working on his own project slimming it down and it seems likely that his experiments, a couple years late frankly, will make their way into vBulletin4.
phpBB has gone tableless. Invision is nearly tableless. When vBulletin4 is released, it will likely turtle its way next to Invision, and use the majority of its tables for what they were meant for: tabular data.
Less tables = faster rendering and less baffling of the search engine spiders, who have been known to get lost in mazes of nested tables, and, for those compliance geeks, true xHTML compliance.
w00t
vBulletin has always not only relied heavily on tables for layout, but heavily defended it as well. Floris, in a grand cop out shifting responsibility to their customer base, had issued a challenge quite a long time ago that says, in summary "if you think it can be done, do it, and these are the rules". He is likely right in that vBulletin cannot currently support itself without any tables, but I think few if any developers, or anyone at vBulletin for that matter, would disagree that vBulletin can get rid of a massive amount of them. Here at ForumMonkeys, most of our skins skim a good number of tables off the markup and some skins actually take a considerable chunk - so the proof is in the pudding. Wayne at vBulletin is working on his own project slimming it down and it seems likely that his experiments, a couple years late frankly, will make their way into vBulletin4.
phpBB has gone tableless. Invision is nearly tableless. When vBulletin4 is released, it will likely turtle its way next to Invision, and use the majority of its tables for what they were meant for: tabular data.
Less tables = faster rendering and less baffling of the search engine spiders, who have been known to get lost in mazes of nested tables, and, for those compliance geeks, true xHTML compliance.
w00t