Hello everyone,

I am taking a moment to write to you about something that has caused a few display issues over the last few days: tables. I have been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on the structure and design of the site. While doing so, I noticed an important problem: some complex layouts made with tables react very badly to even the smallest changes on the site. Sometimes, a simple change in width, margin, image behavior, or structure is enough to shift an entire layout. I had a lot of trouble trying to limit the impact, and I had not intended to work on this at all over the past few days.

In 2018, I added tables thinking that they would mainly be used to display… tables. In other words, information organized in rows and columns: lists, comparisons, schedules, inventories, and so on.

I had not anticipated that they would be used, with a great deal of creativity, to create full layouts. Some creations are very beautiful, and I completely understand the desire to personalize one’s messages. But technically, this is not at all the normal use of a table, and some people have taken their use to the extreme: nested columns, tables within tables, invisible spaces, transparent text, images resized in roundabout ways…

And today, this creates several difficulties.

The first is display on a screen smaller than your own, and of course on phones. This is by far the issue that came up most often in the survey, both on the English site and the French site: many pages are difficult to read on small screens, or even unreadable. Wide tables, numerous columns, or very precisely placed elements can become impossible to display properly without overflowing, crushing the text, or forcing users to zoom in and move horizontally.

The second difficulty concerns accessibility. For people who use screen readers or assistive tools, tables are interpreted as actual data tables. Reading them can become confusing, very long, or even impossible to understand. Accessibility is one of the main reasons behind my work.

The third difficulty concerns the future of the site. As long as some layouts rely on very fragile balances, every change becomes risky. Slightly modifying the width of the parchment, improving mobile display, modernizing the design, or correcting certain behaviors can unintentionally break older creations.

I am not saying this to blame anyone. My mistake, at the beginning, was offering this tool without measuring its possible consequences over time. You made use of it with a great deal of inventiveness, far beyond what I had imagined, and that is also part of what makes the site so rich. But we are reaching a technical limit that we will have to take into account.

So, in time, we will certainly have to find a more durable solution: preserving existing creations as much as possible, while offering better layout tools for the future, tools that are more suitable, more solid, and able to work properly on both computers and phones.

I therefore intend to work with several of you over the coming months to offer new BBCode options that will allow you to create nice things, while remaining flexible enough to last over time and display properly on all devices.

In the meantime, I have made several very immediate adjustments. They are not perfect, but they were necessary.

• On large screens, tables work as before from a width of 1015 pixels. The goal is to preserve existing layouts for people browsing the site on a computer.
• Images now truly respect the requested width. Previously, some images did not always display exactly as expected, which sometimes forced you to “cheat” with the dimensions in order to get the desired result. The behavior is now more predictable, since the correct width is displayed, but this may have a consequence: some images may need to be resized in your older messages to recover the appearance you wanted.
• When a table goes beyond the parchment, a horizontal scroll bar now allows you to see what is on the right. This is not an ideal solution, but it prevents the content from going completely outside the parchment and becoming unreadable, or from breaking the entire page. Whenever possible, however, it is still better to design tables that do not need this bar.
• On small windows and on phones, table columns cannot be displayed side by side without making the text unreadable. They are therefore now displayed one below the other. This is not always as pretty as a layout designed for a computer, but it at least allows the content to be read correctly.

In concrete terms, if you have created very complex layouts, you may notice a few differences: an image that no longer has exactly the same size, a column that moves below another one on phones, or a scroll bar that appears on computers when the table is too wide.

I know this can be frustrating, especially when you have spent a lot of time on a profile, a signature, or a presentation. I will do everything I can to avoid sudden changes and preserve your creations as much as possible.

But I also need to reconcile several important goals: allowing creativity, preserving older messages, making the site readable on phones, improving accessibility, and continuing to let the site evolve without every modification threatening to break entire pages.

For the future, I therefore advise you, whenever possible, to avoid using tables for overly complex layouts. They can remain useful for actual data tables, but they are fragile when used to build an entire design. I will think about better tools, better suited to this purpose, so that you can continue to create beautiful presentations without depending on solutions that are so difficult to maintain.

Thank you in advance for your understanding. I know these topics can be sensitive, because they touch on your creations and on messages you care about. Please rest assured that I am fully aware of this, and that my goal is not to erase or damage what you have made, but on the contrary to make the site more durable, so that this content remains readable and accessible in the years to come.

Please do not hesitate to report any pages that cause problems, especially if some content becomes unreadable or unusable.

See you soon!

Thank you so much Zach for all the time and effort you have put into this! We all really appreciate your work!! Merci

hope it's alright that I reply; what a thorough set of updates for all the unaccounted table issues, I'm quite glad to see it happen in real time. thank you, clearly so much of your work has been put into this process.

We appreciate all that you do for the site! Thank you for continuing to update it and maintaining it for us. It's one of my favorite places on the internet.

Despite having actively used and explored out-of-boundary elements myself, I genuinely prefer these changes.

With the post-container vertical scrollbar, we have gained access to scrollable photo galleries, text boxes and more interactive tools to bring live to our layout designs. It is great and opens up more creative design-choices.

Thank you very much for your hard work, Zachary.

Good evening,

Thank you for your message;

Just a quick note about horizontal scrolling in tables: please see it as a temporary solution, mainly to give everyone time to resize any images that need adjusting.

Ideally, a post should fit comfortably on the screen without readers having to scroll to the right. Horizontal scrolling can be a bit awkward to read, since it is not something people are usually used to doing, so I would not recommend using it deliberately for other layouts or effects.

It may also be removed later on, once things have settled.

Have a nice evening,
Zachary