TABLES?

[thall89553]

I am new to OSCOMMERCE (and PHP for that matter) and wanted to share some thoughts after my first day of attempting to use this wonderful FREE tool. I am attempting to design my first e-commerce website and chose this application for the purpose.

 

One thing that struck me yesterday as I dug into the code was the extensive use of tables. It has come to be my understanding that tables are best used for tabular data, such as a hotel rates & seasons, staff contact information, etc. What I noticed with this program is the tendency to wrap everything up in a table regardless of its content. For example the search box that is contained in a form. A <form> is a block level element in and by itself so I wonder why wrap it in extraneous code? The links for categories are all nested in tables but would be much better if they were in fact <li>'s. Search engines give more weight to links in <li>'s than those that stand alone inside a <td>.

 

Please understand that I do really aprpecaite the efforts of those who have put this together, I think it is wonderful! I would just love to see it improved if at all possible.

[Guest]

i'm relatively new to osc too, and i had a few difficulties with the nested tables myself (and i've been working with html/tables since 98) ... but i have never seen any solid evidence that search engines offer more weight to certain html tags over others. i think that's another old wives' tale... much like everything seo-related

 

if something works for you, stick with it :) i think that's probably what the web designers that made the look of oscommerce did

[thall89553]

I respectfully disagree. I think that extraneous text makes a page harder to parse and I also think that moving forward "cleaner" web pages will be given preference over those that are not as "clean". Imagine if search engines starting checking pages that were w3 compliant as a criteria for placement. I am sure they could easily do this. Also, it is a nice "sales" tool to show a client a neatly formatted page of code as opposed to one of jibberish. Maybe you can help me with one thing, I can't find where this snippet </td></tr></table> is being inserted, do you know? It comes right before the "<!-- categories_eof //-->".

 

<!-- categories //-->
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
 <tr>
<td height="14" class="infoBoxHeading"><img src="images/infobox/corner_left.gif" border="0" alt="" width="11" height="14" /></td>
<td width="100%" height="14" class="infoBoxHeading">Categories</td>
<td height="14" class="infoBoxHeading" ><img src="images/pixel_trans.gif" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></td>
 </tr>
</table>
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" class="infoBox">
 <tr>
<td><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" class="infoBoxContents">
 <tr>
<td class="boxText"><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">Hardware-></a>?(6)<br /><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=2&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">Software-></a>?(4)<br /><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=3&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">DVD Movies-></a>?(17)<br /></td>
 </tr>
</table>
</td>
 </tr>
</table>
<!-- categories_eof //-->

[Flyer5]

I respectfully disagree. I think that extraneous text makes a page harder to parse and I also think that moving forward "cleaner" web pages will be given preference over those that are not as "clean". Imagine if search engines starting checking pages that were w3 compliant as a criteria for placement. I am sure they could easily do this. Also, it is a nice "sales" tool to show a client a neatly formatted page of code as opposed to one of jibberish. Maybe you can help me with one thing, I can't find where this snippet </td></tr></table> is being inserted, do you know? It comes right before the "<!-- categories_eof //-->".

 

<!-- categories //-->
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
 <tr>
<td height="14" class="infoBoxHeading"><img src="images/infobox/corner_left.gif" border="0" alt="" width="11" height="14" /></td>
<td width="100%" height="14" class="infoBoxHeading">Categories</td>
<td height="14" class="infoBoxHeading" ><img src="images/pixel_trans.gif" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></td>
 </tr>
</table>
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" class="infoBox">
 <tr>
<td><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" class="infoBoxContents">
 <tr>
<td class="boxText"><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">Hardware-></a>?(6)<br /><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=2&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">Software-></a>?(4)<br /><a href="http://www.shopthevitaminstore.com/index.php?cPath=3&osCsid=8a958cbb9bccf0f664170987589bdb60">DVD Movies-></a>?(17)<br /></td>
 </tr>
</table>
</td>
 </tr>
</table>
<!-- categories_eof //-->

 

 

categories is an include in colum left or right, depending on where youve placed it (if in fact you have moved it)

 

the closing tag is in footer.php i believe.

 

Incidentally, why would you show a client a page of code? mine would look at it and call me a geek, and wether it was nicely formatted or not they would have no idea what they were looking at, which is why they pay me in the first place.

[thall89553]

Why? If ya can't dazzle em with brilliance, baffle em with ...

 

Seriously though, I agree with you but when someone can take a look at their existing code for their web page and you show them something very neat and tidy, they may not be a rocket scientist but they'll certainly see the difference. Then you baflle them with bs...