In This Issue...

• Introduction
• The Great Webate: Ajax is Not the Future of the Web
• The Great Webate: Tables Still Have a Place in Web Page Layout
• New Technical Articles
• Techy Forum Threads
• More Techy Blog Entries

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Introduction

As I write this, I'm getting steadily more nervous with each passing minute. The Melbourne Web Standards Group's "The Great Webate" is on tonight, and I've been randomly assigned a couple of very tough positions to defend!

First, fellow SitePoint code wrangler Paul Annesley and I will be arguing that Ajax is not the future of the Web. And as if if that isn't hard enough, Andrew Krespanis and I will then take the stage to prove that HTML tables still have a place in web page layout. Somehow, I got stuck with defending all the unpopular views!

In a (possibly futile) attempt to calm my jitters, I'm going to use this issue to lay out the arguments for our side of each of the above points. Next issue, I'll let you know what the opposing sides had to say, and which side won!

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The Great Webate: Ajax is Not the Future of the Web

At tonight's meeting of the Melbourne Web Standards Group, Paul Annesley and I have been assigned to argue against the statement "Ajax is the Future of the Web." Here's a sneak peek at what we plan to say! Please bear in mind: we may not actually agree with everything that is stated here!

The Web was designed from the ground up to be a structure of interlinking pages:

• Web servers were written to support short-lived HTTP requests.
• Browsers were designed with back/forward buttons and bookmarks for navigation.
• Accessibility tools like screen readers were written to read documents from top to bottom.
• Search engines use URLs to represent documents with content to be indexed.

The whole point of Ajax is that it allows you to escape this page-based model when necessary and appropriate. But is it appropriate for Ajax to entirely replace the page-based model that has defined the Web since its inception? Of course not. That's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Yes, there are a number of web-based applications that have abandoned the page-based model in favor of Ajax. Examples include GMail, Google Maps, Zimbra, and many others. Why are these applications so popular? Is it because people like using applications that are confined to the browser?

Of course not. The reason these apps are popular is because they are available wherever you have access to a web browser, and you don't need any special permissions to install them.

But desktop applications are evolving to provide these same benefits. Connected applications are beginning to draw on online services and storage. New platforms like Adobe AIR are emerging that enable desktop applications to be installed and launched from the Web with a single click.

Far from being the future of the Web, Ajax is merely the prototype for these emerging desktop application platforms.

From a development standpoint, Ajax-based web applications of the sort that Google produces are actually quite fragile, and require a great many hacks to work across the range of current browsers—let alone future browsers.

These issues were never more evident than when Google released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) so that everyone could build web applications the Google way. Within weeks, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, and suddenly every GWT-based app displayed a blank page in IE7 while Google scrambled to develop a fix. How well do you expect today's Ajax applications to perform on browsers written five and ten years from now?

In addition to this fragility, Ajax applications are a pox on web security. The same domain policy that is fundamental to security on the web dictates that an application loaded from one web server should not be able to contact another web server. The same domain policy is an important hurdle that Ajax applications racing to replace desktop applications must clear; consequently, a lot of effort has gone into finding loopholes and work-arounds to the same domain policy.

If it weren't for the Ajax applications that depend on them, these "loopholes" would be called security holes, and would be fixed by the browser vendors. But thanks to Ajax applications, they're considered features, and are left to threaten the security of all web users.

In effect, a user of an Ajax application grants blanket permissions for that application to do whatever it likes with the user's data. New platforms for web-enabled desktop applications such as Adobe AIR, however, offer robust security models that give the user granular control to make informed decisions about what happens to that data.

In summary, every concession made to Ajax weakens the page-based model that made the Web the success it is today.

This has happened before. Back in the mid-nineties, web browsers came out with support for frames, and suddenly it seemed as though you couldn't design a web site without them. Eventually, however, developers realized that frames caused more problems than they solved, and frames were largely abandoned in favor of more sensible design techniques.

Ajax applications are the frames of Web 2.0.

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The Great Webate: Tables Still Have a Place in Web Page Layout

At tonight's meeting of the Melbourne Web Standards Group, Andrew Krespanis and I have been assigned to argue for the statement "Tables Still Have a Place in Web Page Layout." Here's a sneak peek at what we plan to say! Please bear in mind: we may not actually agree with everything that is stated here!

HTML tables enable web designers do one thing very well: design with 2D grids. And let's face it: if one thing has remained constant in web design over the past ten years, it's that designs are commonly based on 2D grids.

Without tables, HTML content is designed to only stack vertically, one block on top of the other. Grids require the horizontal and vertical stacking that tables can provide. You can emulate this to some extent using CSS floats, but that's not what floats were designed to do; using them this way tends to produce a lot of unexpected problems and trigger obscure browser bugs.

The biggest reason given for avoiding HTML tables for layout is because table-based layout is misusing a feature intended for another purpose. We believe the same logic should apply to CSS floats: using floats for grid layouts is, to some extent, misusing CSS.

But we can argue ideals all day—the practical reality is that tables do some things much better than CSS.

For one thing, tables can give you columns that stretch to accommodate their contents' width—automatically. In CSS, the closest thing you can do is specify column widths in ems, which are imprecise, and also force you to update your CSS every time the contents of the column change.

Another point in favor of tables is that my mom and dad can understand them. My parents will never "get" CSS grid layout techniques like negative margins and faux columns, nor should they be expected to.

Our opposition will no doubt tell you about accessibility problems caused by layout tables. Well, the Web should be universally accessible to publishers too, not just readers. We're not saying that you should be using tables for layout, just that some people cannot yet be reasonably expected to lay out their sites with CSS, and for those people tables are still a good solution.

But what about the problems caused by layout tables, you may wonder?

What problems? Every browser and assistive technology currently in use has had to deal with layout tables for years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

A layout table is actually very easy to detect and handle appropriately. In the same way that a <div> or <span> tag with no semantically meaningful attributes can safely be ignored by systems looking to extract meaning from markup, a table with only bare <td> tags communicates no semantically significant information, and can be reasonably assumed to be a layout table.

Layout tables may even have some benefits if we open our minds to them. One cell in your layout grid may reasonably be considered a "header" for another cell. Layout tables let you describe this relationship in your markup, while div-heavy CSS layouts do not.

One day, browsers will support the CSS 3 Advanced Layout module, and grid layouts will be easy for anyone to produce with CSS. When that day comes, layout tables may well be out of business, and we'll be happy to see them go.

In the meantime, tables still have a place in web layout.

Of course, there are two sides to every story, so be sure to read the next issue of the Tech Times, in which I'll sum up the arguments of our opponents in tonight's debate. Oh, and I'll also let you know which side won!

Kevin Yank
techtimes@sitepoint.com
Editor, The SitePoint Tech Times

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