Tech Note: Do the Tighten Up

Science | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:48:56 pm PDT

In the latest tech note that will inevitably become an open thread, still more outdated code has been trimmed, modernized, and tightened up in the LGF Blog Engine templates. The comment entry form that registered users see is now table-free, using floated elements to create a table-like look for the form inputs, with labels right aligned and fields left aligned on a central point.

There are two areas left that still use tables: 1) the comment meta line with username, icon, etc. (we could do it with lists or DIVs, but CSS vertical alignment within block level elements stinks and it ends up looking lopsided and breaking as soon as the text size is increased), and 2) the Statistics drop-down menu in the left sidebar (because a table is appropriate for that kind of tabular data).

That vertical alignment thing is a sore subject with many web designers; it’s currently the top-rated item on Webmonkey’s CSS Wishlist.