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Forms and Table cells - are they compatible?

 
Greenhorn
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Hi all,
I have just been asked to apply some some HTML design to a prebuilt application where the developers are EXTREMELY protective of their code. Each page involves several forms which they have placed willy-nilly amongst table rows.
ie:
<form action=blah>
<tr><td>Cell stuff here with form elements</td></tr>
<tr><td>Another cell here with more elements
</form>
</td></tr>
<form2 action=blech>
etc...
Now my belief has always been that forms and tables don't mix well. Either the entire form should be within a table cell or it should span the entire table. Unfortunately the developers are very insistent that I do not touch their code and only modify the colors of the cells.... sigh....
Does anyone know of any documentation/websites to back up my claim that their structure is not going to stand up well across browsers and multiple OS once it goes into production?
Or am I just being an old-fashioned crank?
Thanks for any input.
Kat
 
Ranch Hand
Posts: 301
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Actually, I consider table design to be the saving grace of forms. From a layout perspective it is just about the only way to have a form look decent.
I'm not sure if I've done multiple forms spread across table barriers, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. The only rule that I know of would be that all the form elements have to be together inside the form tags ... in other words forms can't share fields, although that too could probably be gotten around with a little creative JavaScript.
Here is my favorite example to date. I've stripped the proprietary stuff and the CSS specs out of it, but it includes multiple tables inside Fieldsets inside one huge form (and it looks snazzy to boot!)


Cheers!
Joel

[This message has been edited by Joel Cochran (edited October 25, 2001).]
 
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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