I seem to find myself saying this all too often this year, to both new staff and other friends in the wider community so I thought it best to post briefly. I know a lot of others have covered this topic in the past and continue to do so, but it doesn’t always seem to get through to people.

Do not use <table> for layouts

<table> and its related tags are provided in HTML 4.01 to provide a means for which to define tabular data. Their purpose is neither one or layout or display and should not be used to achieve any visualisation of any type. They exist solely to provide a definition for tabular data. 

Well yeah..

It was a popular message, here comes CSS and it answers a bunch of questions about how we style content. But somewhere along the way the message seemed to be misinterpreted or lost in some way… and turned into

“don’t use tables, they are evil” – which it seems a large proportion of entry level web developers still believe to be true. So now we find hordes of people looking at css layout techniques for floating cells to replicate the same functionality a table provides…

Stop it.. oh my god

The original message was “Do not use <table> for layouts” and that is still true, don’t set them at 100% width and start putting your menu and content areas inside tables, it is bad form. But this doesn’t mean stop using tables. If you are displaying tabular data then use a table, its why they exist. Tables are not evil, just the way people chose to use them a few years ago was. 

Oh, and you can make them sexy using CSS.

“Please use IE or Firefox to view this page.”

Since when did adding an event to a calendar become such a difficult task as to exclude Safari? Of course I browsed over to Google Calendar in Safari and added events galore…

Back in late May this year I downloaded the first beta release of the Versions SVN client from http://versionsapp.com and while impressed with its simple layout, native OS X integration and clean approach to SVN it did seem lacking in feature set. Granted over the subsequent 6 or 7 releases the product has improved further, but I still don’t feel it is suitable for our own internal development teams.

At exactly the same time Cornerstone 1.0 was released by Zennaware. This full featured SVN client provided some nice features for repository browsing, a nice visual separation of repositories and working copies and all the shortcut keys you could ask for (something that bugged me with Syncro SVN and SmartSVN).

After a few weeks of random testing I settled on using Cornerstone as my preferred SVN client on OS X and purchased the product, then at version 1.0.3. Unfortunately there were some issues with the 1.0 release, especially around the speed of repository browsing, checkout/in and refreshing working copies. After a few days I went almost nuts with the constant waiting on large repositories and fired off an email to creator at Zennaware.

To his credit he acknowledged the bugs, provided some work around options for the meantime and asked if I would like to assist in beta testing the 1.1 release.

Over the past 12 weeks or so the 1.1 release has been beta tested and gone through numerous revisions, fixes and improvements resulting in a very polished product and certainly an SVN client I would recommend for developers on Mac OS X.

In another post I will provide a detailed comparison of my thoughts on Cornerstone, Versions, Syncro SVN and SmartSVN the four clients I have worked with through this year.

In the meantime download a trial copy of the Cornerstone 1.1 release from the Zennaware website.

Anglican Taonga, a magazine published by the Anglican Church in New Zealand, approached Quiqcorp back in late 2007 regarding the opportunity to web-enable their magazine. They were looking to take the next step in the evolution of communication and try to provide materials to their readership in a shorter timeframe with the ability to cover more features than possible within a usual print setting.

The result of this collaboration is Anglican Taonga, a simple but effective eZ Publish 4.0 deployment to suit the requirements of the client. In addition, they can grow into this solution as additional areas of the Church look to expand their online presence.