restaurant menu layout

Re: restaurant menu layout

Brian <usenet1@juliet remblay.com.inv alid-remove-this-part> wrote:
[color=blue]
> I have a restaurant menu to layout.
>
> http://www.tsmchughs.com/menus/[/color]

The menu at e.g. http://www.tsmchughs.com/menus/lunch is quite conveniently
readable - on Lynx. It's less clear on graphic browsers. Except when printed
using your print style sheet, which creates a pretty good presentation,
though it would probably benefit from bolding the dish names.
[color=blue]
> The format is item name, price, description, and possibly additional
> price info (e.g., soup and salad price).[/color]

As usual, I wish to point out that you are actually (ab)using <dl> markup
for presentational effects, rather than presenting a list of definitions
(does "$2.95 / Bowl $5.95" constitute a definition of what the term "Soup of
the Day" means?), and then encounter problems with the styling of <dl>
elements.
[color=blue]
> I currently have the items in 2 columns[/color]

And this is somewhat inflexible - it does not work well in narrow windows,
especially since there's the site navigation meny on the left.

There are various approaches to how a menu should be marked up. Instead of
<dl>, I would consider using a table - after all, it is tabular information,
with structurally similar sets of data for each dish - or, maybe more
practically if you don't prefer visual tabular presentation, a collection of
class'ed <div> elements containing headings (<h2>, with the dish names). In
the latter case, you could relatively easily make the entries boxes with a
specific width and height (in em units of course), with borders and floated
to the left, and with adequate padding and margins.

I would actually suggest the simple linear approach, i.e. the <div> way,
which makes it possible to change the appearance later, by changing just a
style sheet, in the best case.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/