Peter... it's like watching Frodo break down with that ring in his pocket my friend. `Twould be so easy to flop that sucker on and satisfy your inner desires, but you got to fight it. Just before you were up in a tiff about the frustrations, and today you turned over. You need to take this weekend off, get laid, drink heavily, and just get in a zone to concentrate on the code. Soothe your nerves. Screw the clients for a moment. Use tables at work to make your job easier for awhile, but just keep at CSS until you feel comfortable with it on the side.
I'm younger than most on this list and as such I don't work full time and don't necessarily work under the hot breath of clients trying to meet deadlines and keep production costs down, so I get to play and experiment a bit more and likely pick things up quicker than the average joe. Definitely not as talented as Russ or the other big wigs in here, but imitation is the purest form of flattery, no? :)
It *WILL* come to you Peter, it just will probably take awhile. I can only imagine what it's like to be a one-man design team and meet deadlines. I'm sure it doesn't warrant much time to stop, sit back, and learn at your own pace. Rushing into CSS especially is tough because you miss the small things that make the biggest loads of difference. When I write CSS now, I write with the hacks and incompatibilities all in mind which has cut down on having to go back and stare at my terminal with bloodshot eyes cursing standards. I went through that phase, still do sometimes, like was mentioned earlier. It gets easier though. Much easier. But it takes time, patience, and a tranquilizer IV to get there.
I'm actually mid-process right now at my job trying to incorporate div layouts into a website that is 100% tables and 100% non-standard. By website I mean the entire collective of pages that make up http://www.jmu.edu ... it is purely speculative at this point, but all pages follow a similar template and I want to forumlate a war plan to take this bull by the horns. In the meantime, I'm currently assigned to two projects at the moment for the psychology department and the computer science department. After months and months of studying and toying and a handful of mock jobs, and "fireside standards" chats with my boss who also wants to see standards employed usually at 8am over a steaming cup of joe at the office, it's finally starting to pull through for me.
Psychology and computer science are looking at XHTML 1.0 strict div-layout sites templated by hand in Dreamweaver. If anyone cares to take the validator and rip-roar through the university websites, you'll find all table layouts, all shabby, and they're even using font tags still. I usually do a search through JMU web each morning looking for a horrible site to laugh at - call it my Mon-Fri Saturday funnies. Psych and CS will be the milestone in determining if the trend will take or we'll be stuck with hybrid tabled layouts, which are much more of a pain in the ass to develop.
Psychcology and CS have the same underlying code structures, but both have radically different CSS controllers. ZenGarden gave me the idea, and after I came up with the initital specs on a general code strcture, developing both the sites took a week less than what they used to. In a couple days when the TSEC group gives a final nod to what the graphics designer is brewing up, it's going div-laid as well. One of Russ's recent emails was great for me, since I had to give reason to start making the change now, and furthermore, my boss, who also acts as the PR to the (grumpy, outspoken, know-it-all, ... etc) college faculty overseeing the development, needed something to tell the departments on how their sites were being developed.
So she basically didn't tell them anything specific ... just that we'd let them know when a working copy was ready to be viewed and tested. It has worked beautifully so far. Explaining that it might not work in all browsers but remain readable nonetheless would have blown the projects to smithereeeens - because "not work" isn't an option for education websites that need to be up and accessible for students. As Peter hinted, the lowest viewing came from an IE 5.5 installation on the Linux professor's outdated office machine, and even then there were no complaints. What they don't know don't hurt em.
Without this list, I think I'd still be stuck chopping up BMP's in Fireworks into grainy tabled JPG horrors that took a year and then some to load.
No fruit from here, just some hope.
--Ryan http://www.theward.net
Universal Head wrote:
I feel like I'm going to be hunted down by the Inquisition but I just gave up, added two simple two column tables to my code, and got the whole thing working within half an hour.
I'm still going to be using CSS when I can, but when it comes to work it's Transitional all the way for the moment.
<anticipating rotten fruit, clods of dung, etc> Peter.
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