[Solar-talk] Question about using forms

[Paul M Jones]

On Nov 21, 2007, at 8:25 AM, Kilbride, James P. wrote:

> Here here! I sometimes get sick of all the CSS people use when it  
> suddenly starts doing strange things because of window sizes or  
> because it loaded wacky(I don't know about you folks, but I've seen  
> some very odd things happen when part of the form loads but some  
> other element linked into some other file fails to load for some  
> reason and only part of the CSS loads). I like CSS a lot and I've  
> also seen that CSS just doesn't quite seem to do certain things  
> quite right easily. If all you've got is tabulated data, you want  
> it to keep it's size tables really do make sense. The same is true  
> for forms. I have a form, for example, which is a dyanmic list of  
> elements that are to be laid out left to right. Tables are quick,  
> simple and perfect. All depends on what you want something for.

When you say "All depends ..." I completely agree.

To be clear, I'm not against using tables for forms -- I did it for a  
long time.  There's even an older Savant3 (and Savant2, iirc) helper  
for table-based forms.  But my work experience has led me to CSS- 
based forms almost all of the time, and so that's what the Solar form  
helper works like.

I think there's more than one way to do things; the way you choose is  
determined by experience, circumstances, requirements, and  
preferences.  I'm not going to argue that "CSS is the one and only  
true way!" because it's not, although in most cases I have found it  
to be superior to the existing alternatives.

So by all means, build table-based forms if that's what you really  
need (and only you know what you really need).  If you create a table- 
based form helper based on that work, I'd be thrilled to review it  
for inclusion into Solar.



--

Paul M. Jones  <http://paul-m-jones.com>

Solar: Simple Object Library and Application Repository
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Join the Solar community wiki!  <http://solarphp.org>

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