Tableless forum layouts?

[CHeeSeBLiND]

Anyone here attempted to make a forum without tables?

I was contemplating coding my own and adding it to one of my sites. The site is already tableless and thats the way i like it plus i like the challenge.

So has anyone attempted it?
Passed with flying colours or gave up and went back to tables?

If anyone has any examples I'd love to see them.

Cheers

[Arkkimaagi]

I've tried it every now and then, but I have nothing online atm.

However, listing the topics and stuff like that belongs to tables imho. It's tabular data after all.

Post threads could be tabless.

I've seen some examples in the web about this occasionally, nothing breathtaking so far. I'd be interested to see an example that really has benefits over the old ways.

[Paul O'B]

Hi,

I think forums are best suited to tables and although you can copy tables with css its very often too complicated to be of any real use other than experimenting.

For example heres a css multi column/row table that works perfectly:

http://www.pmob.co.uk/temp/fourcellsboth.htm

But look at the code needed and you can see its not much use as its far too heavy and complicated.

Of course you could be innovative and come up with a new forum design that doesn't consist of rows and columns - but of course the very nature of forums produces data rows which is why they all look similar.

If its your own site and you want a challenge then have a go -

Paul

[earther]

I ran across a tableless skin for phpBB. If you go to the collection of skins on the phpBB site, you can find it - I forget the name.

[jeffyjones]

If you don't mind the occasional nudie, check out Suicide Girls. They've managed to pull it off in their forum.

[megamanXplosion]

Ugh. Message boards are mostly tabular data and tables should be used for tabular data! In the old era of design, tables were misused to represent non-tabular data or designs and now tables are not used at all and instead something else is being misused to present tabular data. Using tableless layouts for tabular data is just as, if not more, evil than using tables for non-tabular data. Neither solution is correct. Forums = Tabular Data = Tables. Use the correct tool for the job, tables.