Webates: Social ajax tables

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 11:01pm

Unlike my last attempt, tonight I went along to The Greate Webate. A Web Standards Group meeting that took the form of a series of mini-debates.

Since Gian was participating in one of the debates it was a simple matter of getting a lift in with her.

As for the meeting?

It was pretty good. Prior to the debates and afterwards at the pub I ended up talking to about a dozen people about various things. In comparison to the perl mongers meetings there was a variety of roles (not everyone was a developer) and, for the developers, a variety of languages (not everyone was using perl). I will definitely try to attend the future meetings.

Now for the debates themselves…

I disagree with Ajax Is The Future Of The Web as the future needs to be something that is more designed than evolved which should handle the inconsistencies and flaws. One good line compared Ajax with frames as they both started out as the shiny new technology that everyone had to use, but over time frames became a must not.

I also disagree with Online Social Networking Is Indispensable as there is a massive amount of people who don’t use them. While they may enable interactions that otherwise would be missed they are something that you can live without. A personal irritation is instant messaging and services such as Twitter. I don’t want to see your random thoughts. Spend a bit of time to write a meaningful paragraph or two and email it, blog it, whatever.

In contrast I totally agree with Tables Still Have A Place In Web Page Layout. As long as we continue to use a grid to lay out content there will be (some) places where tables are the most robust approach. As for the argument that there must be a separation between presentation and content: many of the CSS layout techniques require excessive div or span tags to work, they are presentation elements mixed in with the content…

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