[pmwiki-devel] Default Skin: Switch to CSS Table?

[H. Fox]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 12:25 AM, Petko Yotov <5ko at 5ko.fr> wrote:
> I have reviewed this skin. The changes from the default skin are indeed very
> minimal: it simply replaces the <table>, <tr> and <td> tags with <div> tags,
> and inserts 3 instructions in the skin css file to display these <div>
> elements as if they were a table.
>
> I believe this will make it look exactly the same, pixel for pixel, compared
> to the current default skin, for browsers that support CSS 2.1 (most
> browsers since 2006, MSIE since 2009).
>
>  http://caniuse.com/#search=css%20table
>
> It will not look the same with MSIE 6 and 7, where the main page content
> will appear pushed down below the bottom of the sidebar.
>
> Do you think it is better to replace the default skin, or to distribute
> PmWiki with both skins?

Good idea... maybe auto-update to the new table-less version if the
wikiadministrator just installs / upgrades, with an option to easily
provide enhanced real-old-browser compatibility with:

$Skin='compat';

(There's likely a better name for it than "compat".)

If you do that, you could move the deprecated
   border='0'
HTML attribute out of the template and possibly add a CSS selector.  I
think the selector would be
   #wikilogo img { border:0px; }
or possibly a selector isn't even necessary.

...and leave the attribute in the HTML-Table version.

The HTML5 validator issues a warning for that attribute.  I'm almost
certain it's an attribute (rather than CSS) because of
browser-compatibility purposes that don't exist in browsers that
understand CSS Tables.

Hagan

> Petko
>
> H. Fox writes:
>>
>> I'm spending some time on this because I think a lot of people in the
>> PmWiki community would want to improve the default skin so it uses CSS
>> for separating the template design from the semantics of the wiki
>> content.
>>
>> One fantastic charastic of PmWiki is that upgrading rarely breaks
>> things.  I don't know whether hurting compatibility with Intnernet
>> Exploer 6 & 7 is worth having better semantic structure by not putting
>> the wiki sidebar and page content inside HTML Table.  This post has
>> some information for everyone to consider, if interested.
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