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please give some advice?

6
2006-07-29 07:45:42, Category: Programming & Design
i am creating a large website and i am working on it alone without any help. please tell me what should i use for layout of my website tables or css? i sholud put data directly or should use xml? please advice i am new to web designing.

Answers

  1. Max

    On 2006-07-29 07:51:19


    if you are planning for a small site use CSS and directly put data or if it is big use CSS and import from database using xml

  2. illuminator

    On 2006-07-29 07:49:08


    using css would benifit greatly because you wont have to worry about the styles once you start creating lots of web pages. Also the file size of the webpage would be less because css would be externally linked.

  3. IceHammer

    On 2006-07-29 07:54:01


    use css and xml. they're both advanced, support better techniques and features. consequently, ur site comes better both in terms of looks and working.. all the best.

  4. lwcomputing

    On 2006-07-29 07:49:00


    css - it's more advanced. data should be in a database. XML can act as a database, but I'd use SQL Server of some kind.

  5. dwightl.geo

    On 2006-07-29 07:59:45


    this subject has been argued to death. i myself use css in my site. but doing so means that my site is compatible with fewer browsers and browser versions. tables on the other hand work with more browsers but give you less power and makes it harder to make changes to your site. there is an old saying in web design. keep it simple stupid. this is called the kiss method.

  6. Atris

    On 2006-07-29 09:03:12


    Modern thinking is to use HTML for semantic markup only. This would imply that a tag should only be used for marking up real tables (i.e. things that are logically structured in rows and columns). Marking up things semantically helps devices like screen readers (assistive technology) make sense of the page. Thus, CSS should be used for all maters presentational. On the other hand, the above advice is somewhat idealized. In reality, you will sometimes be forced into using tables for some kinds of complex layouts given the CSS limitations of the browsers that most people are currently using. This will improve in the future since even IE 7 is starting to move more towards standards compliance. You should carefully consider whether you really must use tables for layout (perhaps you can simplify your page layout) and, if you do need them, use them as sparingly as possible. As to data, it does belong in a database. Give MySQL a try. If you're programming in Java, try Hibernate for object-relational mapping. You should also look into scripting languages for database access like PHP, Perl, Python (the "P" languages) or Ruby on rails. XML can be used since some database allow you to do queries and retrieve data as XML. However, you should prefer to present web pages in HTML/CSS rather than XML/CSS since the semantics of HTML are already understood by the browser (and again, it makes assistive technologies work better). This implies that if you use non-HTML based XML, you would want to transform to HTML via XSLT. Therefore, this may be more trouble than its worth and I've always preferred Object-Relational or OO databases myself (in other words, get your data from objects in an OO language and let the objects read/write the database). Finally, code to spec. That is, validate your HTML against one of the W3C XHTML DTDs. Also, test in a variety of browsers, at least recent versions of IE, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari and Konquerer.