Hi Peter
I think there are two things going on here ....
*(and this happens to everyone) Separating the presentation from the content is a new thing. Everyone has trouble with it to start off, as is true for most technologies - I'm a bit perplexed by XSLT and XPath at the moment but I'm getting there. It's a technology of the present and the future which is why I won't give up on it.
A table is perfectly suited to the idea of print design for the screen. But that's where it ends. What is a table? It's a collection of cells. Cells can't exist outside of their parent and they also can't be moved around - once you do the markup that's it and updates require changes to the underlying markup. Move that navigation "list' built in vertical <td>cells to a horizontal list when the client changes their mind and you'll see the benefit of floating a list to the left or not floating it at all.
Markup presented by CSS is another matter entirely - think of it as presenting object based markup. Here's an example in HTML:
<div id="transportmethods">
<div id="cars">
....
</div>
<div id="buses">
....
</div>
</div>We can put buses and cars anywhere on the page with CSS - breaking the constraints of the table. For instance I could buses to the right of cars, or vice versa, or position cars absolutely or hide all buses. In a table layout you'd be switching cells around and fiddling with colspans etc "painful". Of course this doesn't mean anything to a client when they want a new site..... until the dreaded re branding. Do you want to build again from the ground up or re-present your current content?
To illustrate this, some of the work that I do involves reselling an anti spam product to a number of companies. User have to log in to a website to check their trapped spam, read support articles and pay us. Previously this was done with a table based layout and every site had its own copy of the markup. It was a lengthy process to update as changes had to be propagated manually across all sites.
Enter CSS. Now I have one lot of markup and each site gets its own stylesheets. Building an entirely new site for a reseller takes on average about a day's work (one *entire* site took 3 hours and worked in 9 browsers off the bat).
This is where CSS makes good business sense - look at the ongoing cost and not just the initial cost. The trick is to not tell the client about what tools you are going to use, tell them you can cut down their ongoing costs and make their site visible in the next generation of user agents. Tell them your vision for the project rather than the other way round. Will they jump at the chance in 2006 when they can get a site on a PDA immediately when their competitors are fumbling with code 'optimised' for Netscape 4 and IE5? You bet...
*Pixel perfectness... doesn't exist, especially when a pixel in Internet Explorer is about "that" much , or maybe a bit bigger or smaller. It's a web design fallacy bought over from print design. People read your page in one magazine at fixed size and font-size. People view sites in 300x160 to 2048x1960 resolution and anywhere in between and greater. They listen to sites and they view it with fonts sizes that would make a designer weep. They turn your images off and they do other strange things that you haven't thought of.
Remember you are probably the only one who will view your site in 12 browsers. The user on Mac IE5 won't know what your site looks like in Opera 7 for Windows. They may see it as normal. Equally Netscape 4 users could class something normal that we would call crap. But it doesn't matter as long as they can understand what you are trying to get across.
An obsession with getting it right everywhere, not CSS, will turn you insane. In the 4 months since the sites described above have been up a grand total of one Netscape 4(.06) user has mentioned that he was having trouble with it. Did I go and dig out a copy of Netscape 4 from browsers.evolt.org to fix "the problem"? - nup (the last time I did that it (NN4) crashed Windows), I replied to his support ticket and told him the why and the where and the how much time and cost it would be to easily view the website, which was cheaper for everyone concerned.
Hope this helps you out.... don't worry I felt the same way about CSS. And then one day it sort of went "bing" and I thought why the hell did I do that? of course that won't work, I'm gonna do this instead. :D
Cheers James
Universal Head wrote:
OK folks, here's my take this afternoon, I'll be interested in your opinions.
I'm a one-man design company, have been for almost ten years. I've been making sites and learning the latest tools (not only for the web, but for 3D, print and motion graphics) all that time. So I've course I've embraced web standards. But frankly, despite the evangelical cries of it's supporters, I don't think CSS is ready for prime-time yet. Sure, for some sites and some uses, it's great. But for a moment, let's be hard headed about this, and think about a person running a business. Due to the mess that browser render engines and their support of CSS are in, developing CSS sites is taking at least twice the amount of time it would normally. And the cold hard fact is, even if you explain the advantages to a client, most of them really couldn't care less if you made the site with an old paintbrush, some chewing gum and a piece of string, as long as it looks and works great and does what they wanted it do. Which is what all the sites I've made, relatively quickly and relatively easily - using tables - have done in the past.
So for someone like me, trying to make a living and trying to have some cashflow, why make fully CSS sites unless I can persuade the client to PAY EXTRA for the advantages that CSS sites bring, and to make it worthwhile for me as I spend the extra hours compensating for obscure browser bugs and massaging the site into something that will work on even just the major latest ones. And not many clients will want to do that.
I'd be interested in any and all - short of out-and-out abusive -feedback on these thoughts. Maybe you'll just say "stop yer whining and keep workin' ", but I think, from the discussions I've had with others, that I'm not alone. I believe in the future of CSS. I just don't believe that I can afford as a person running a business to spend the time compensating for the crappy support of it at the moment.
BTW, I may feel completely the opposite after I've got out of her and had three beers (any minute now).
Peter
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