When tables are a bad idea

Remember my plea for help a couple of weeks ago? I haven’t really had any success with this (even though nice people tried to help me).

But then things picked up in the last few days: I browsed through the “Agile Web Development with Rails” book and found a note that basically said, that Internet Explorer is borked when you try to manipulate the DOM of a table. It seems, that it’s not able to handle the innerHTML attribute of table rows or table cells.

Then last week, I met Wolmer Facchin who just jumped into rails and has been doing a lot of DOM / CSS / Semantic HTML work. Today, I described my problem in more detail. After just two hours I got an email from him, telling me about a couple of bugs in my HTML and a suggested fix, using dl lists. Not only has my code gotten easier, I got rid of a large table, and my application now works across all browsers (including IE). Thanks Wolmer!

Oh: Yes, you will be able to see that application… At Tweakfest at the end of may.

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