Special Edition Using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003

I love tables. I always have. It was the realization of table's powers (paired with included content files) that let me move Web development from a page-a-day process to a site-a-week method. Tables are part of the reason I am such a fan of FrontPage the product makes it so easy to add and edit table content as needed.

I love fancy graphics and sites that look like a million bucks. A picture does speak a thousand words, and the Web is still king at delivering such content. Look at the screenshots again in this chapter…wow, impressive stuff.

When I surf the Internet on anything other than my desktop, I'm always amazed at the ways "other" browsers handle tables and the like. There is the Pocket PC method of trying to successfully re-create the browsing experience on a much smaller window; there is the Eudora Web approach on the Palm pilots of just taking the text; and there is the HipTop approach to ignoring tables and presenting data as one long scroll without the annoying left-right issues that plague the Pocket PC approach. I won't even mention WAP browsers or assistive browsing devices and how they might handle these effects.

Layout tables help you produce gorgeous results. There is no denying that. They trump some of the other Web development products with their effects, and that is going to make a lot of FrontPage users very happy. When used in conjunction with the new dynamic Web template features, FrontPage now offers a very powerful page layout system unlike anything else out there.

The problem is simple: Layout tables assume a world where people are surfing the Internet on the screen size associated with a desktop or laptop computer. They just play havoc with the nontraditional browsers, and, well, those nontraditional browsers are seeing their numbers inch up every day.

I'm not quite sure what to do about these issues. All the great new technologies seem to come with their reality-set limitations. Why can't we have the good without the bad?

First of all, I'll admit, I am going to use layout tables and cells in Web design. They are just too impressive and too powerful not to do so. You will see at lot of them at FrontPage World very soon.

But, and I say this with hesitance, I'm also going to examine what I need to do with users who are using browsers and fonts in which such effects will be more of a nuisance than a help.

I have been looking at the Check Browser behavior as a means to make sure my traffic goes to the pages that work best for them.

I suggest that you do the same.