At 10:24 PM 1/17/2009 -0800, Dan Gayle wrote:
>Part of it is a generational gap between younger web designers and
>older. I never knew that table based designs were ever ok. The books
>always talk about table based layouts as if the Civil War were still
>raging, and the victory of the good North (CSS) was almost complete
>over the evil South (table-based layouts).
Hey, we might be old, but we're not *that* old (and we're certainly
still quite a way from the grave). ;)
>But another part of why tables hurt my brain is the lack of semantic
>structure. I can look at, analyze, and improve the code of a <div>
>and CSS based layout any day.
Just to play Devil's Advocate...
And I can create a site with tables, and -- assuming that I'm happy
with my design -- I *don't* have to subsequently look at, analyze and
improve on the code, having to come up with all sorts of hacks and
fixes to make it work right (and always worrying, still, if I did
actually get it right), and constantly worrying about what the next
versions of browsers are going to do, all the testing and fixing that
I'll have to go through, over and over again, forever re-doing and
re-learning everything that I've already done/learning, forever
having to "fix" things that were previously fixed (often with great
time, effort and exasperation). On the contrary, the sites that I
created 10+ years ago have lived through numerous browsers and
browser versions, not once ever "breaking" in any of them, not once
ever needing any change (indeed, the *only* major change that I've
had to make on *any* of my older sites was when I first implemented
CSS in them). The sites that you're making today with CSS layouts
will quite possibly be completely obsolete within 5 years, but the
sites that I've made with tables will in all likelihood still be
around -- and working/looking perfectly fine -- in 100 years (unless,
of course, the CSS Police decide to abolish and impound the entire
concept of tables, forever and anon). ;)
>What is there to guess about this structure? It's easy, it makes
>sense, and is really easy to modify.
><div id="header"></div>
><ul id="nav"></ul>
><div id="content"></div>
><div id="sidebar"></div>
><div id="footer"></div>
>
>But when I look at the structure of even a simple table based layout,
>I have to blink my eyes a few times to even guess at what I'm looking
>at.
Seriously? Messy/disastrous coding practices aside (which can apply
to CSS layouts just as much as table layouts), but do you mean you
can make sense of your code, above, but you can't make sense of this
code, below?
<tr>
<td id="header" colspan="3"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="nav"></td>
<td id="content"></td>
<td id="sidebar"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="footer" colspan="3"></td>
</tr>
My code might *look* like there's more work involved in creating it,
but what you're not showing in your code is all the countless hacks
and fixes that you have to implement "behind the scenes" -- whereas
my code requires *none*, *zero*, and in all likelihood never will.
Ron ;)
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