I was wondering if there is an iniciative in making a revision of XOOPS most important modules and redoing their templates without using tables? If a theme is 100% validated XHTML and CSS as soon as some of the modules are installed it loses the validation. This would be a good thing to look into for the future.

Yes, there is initiatives to get theme developers and module developers work closer together to allow for better possibilities of a theme deciding the look of a module without the module's templates making it look out of style.

What XHTML and CSS validation has to do with tables, you'll need to explain further. To my knowledge a well-formed table is not against any XHTML or CSS validation rules.

Tables are perfectly OK for presenting tabular data, but not ok for positioning elements on a page. I'm guessing this is the main difference.

Herko

The problem also comes in when the tables have their own styles hardcoded in. This usually breaks XHTML validation.

Gober:

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Have you checked out the webstats of your website lately?

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From my point of view, I don't care if "Bill and the boys" are worried or not. I care more about the users that visit my sites. Therefore I study and learn everyday from the best examples I can find in internet.

What I've learned so far is to look in to Firefox first then IE.

IE sooner or later will have to "catch up" to Firefox.

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Every day. Wouldn't of made the statement unless I had stats to base it on.

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Exactly! Since around 80% of the users that visit my site are IE, sorry FF. It doesn't mean I ignore FF however....

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I'm just the opposite as the reasons stated above.

(second attempt at posting this - I took too long the first time...)

Basically, I think the real challenge is getting programmers out of the design, which is why XOOPS uses templates, themes, and smarty. And, I think the designers need some guidelines for proper theme development.

Here's some things I have discovered -
1. Elements, Classes and IDs are not always used correctly in XOOPS (Core and Modules). You can often find the same ID tag on more than one element in a page, which is not valid - this should be a class, instead.
2. Module styles have set attributes for html elements that affect the entire site, not just the module's appearance. If you are going to style an element in your module, at least give it a class or ID so you don't break someone else's theme.
3. Inline styles make it necessary to edit the templates to get control of the style - not a good thing.
4. New selectors that need to be added to your theme's stylesheet so the module/block displays correctly are also not a good thing.
5. Having stylesheets all over the site is also not a good thing (how many places do I have to go to change the appearance of my site and the modules I have selected?)
6. Lots of nested elements makes it difficult to track down just what is affecting an element's appearance. Using WebDeveloper in Firefox (Outline Selected Element) sometimes doesn't get to the element before it goes out of the window....
7. Different browsers display styles differently. Trying to create a stylesheet that works in all browsers can be maddening. A method for having multiple stylesheets to handle browser differences would be good. Here's some example code:


With, or without tables, all of these things need to be addressed in a XOOPS module/theme design document.

</my 2 cents>

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Aren't you missing the point?

It doesn't matter how good the house looks if it's built on s**t foundations. Eventually it will fall down.

The visually impaired man doesn't care how good the house looks, he just wants to be able to get around with ease.

This is not to say that visual styling and layout are not important. But to ignore how pages are built or attempt to devalue well established "best working practices" is just... foolish IMHO.

I just installed XOOPS to have a look at it. As a webdesigner-hobbyist, I wanted to change the theme, so I started fiddling around with the default one.

I was surprised seeing such a bad code for HTML and CSS. The pages really could (and should!) do without tables and the CSS is faulty could be optimized a lot.

Please fix that. As long as you don't, XOOPS sucks.

Ah yes, the popups with the scrolling information for the modules is annoying too. It's lagging in Firefox.