RE: CSS versus tables

I think that the site design also figures in pretty heavily. I looked at
Andrew's site and can see how CSS would work faster and easier for him. Some
of the sites I've worked on are very graphic intense and use images for
navigation, etc. I would never get them laid out correctly with CSS alone
and guarantee that they look great in most browsers. I can almost always
count on tables. My main chore still lies in how to make these graphic heavy
sites as usable and accessible as possible in as many browsers as possible.

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Luebking [mailto:phoenixl@sonic.net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 12:21 PM
To: charles@w3.org; phoenixl@sonic.net
Cc: andrew.mcfarland@unite.net; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: CSS versus tables


Hi,

Just wondering  -  is this true for most rectilinear layouts of
cells or does it refer to certain types of layout, e.g. the common
format of a main area bordered by smaller areas above, below, etc?
I think for this common type of layout CSS is easier (ignoring
the browser problems).  If the layout gets more complex and information
needs to have certain related alignments to other information for visual
appeal, tables can be pretty fast.

Scott

> I'm not Andrew, but here are my answers. The easiest thing for me to do
rough
> work is use a tool that has a nice interface - I point out the regions and
> layout features I want, and the tool does the coding. In that case it
doesn't
> matter as a user which way the code is done, but as a tool developer it is
in
> fact easier to use CSS.
> 
> If I am hand coding it is easier to use CSS than tables for the code.
> 
> The problem is that there are some browsers which not only do not
implement
> CSS, but actually implement it in a way which means that CSS causes
problems
> - this does not happen with the pre-CSS browsers, nor with those whose
> implementation is quite good, but with the early, buggy, test
implementations
> that were necessary to work out whether the spec worked, and what was
> possible and useful, but which should have been advertised as such so
people
> didn't consider them production-standard and insist on using them as if
they
> were.
> 
> Tihs, combined with the fact that tables were implemented earlier than CSS
> and some rudimentary support is available for them in the same broken
> browsers that fail if I use good CSS, means that I have to work out
whether
> to make pages that are broken for new browsers, very old browsers, and
ones
> where the user has customised it in unpredictable ways, but work for
oldish
> browsers (2-5 years old, but covering a significant number of users), or
> whether to make content that works for very old and very new browsers, and
> that any browsers I have never heard of but which conform to the
> specification will know how to handle, at the price of wierd presentation
in
> some common but poor browsers.
> 
> Sorry for the last sentence. If someone can rewrite that in english people
> speak I would be happy.
> 
> cheers
> 
> Chaals

Received on Tuesday, 1 January 2002 20:38:48 UTC