It would still be a useful exercise for the article to demonstrate this approach esp. for the benefit of new developers on how to get the job done while they are still in the process of learning all the required disciplines to achieve the second version. It does take time to learn all these trick / hacks and given that the author knew a lot of the solutions before hand helped him achieve the layout in the time it did. Sometimes its easy to under estimate just how frustrating it can be for new comers to these methods. The table example in the article is a little extreme IMO, most developers still using tables know about CSS and would of at least used padding and borders to do the butterfly image. Forget the font tags too, I've not seen anyone first hand using these in a long time. The all or nothing attitude is not helpful to people learning since they just give up and go back to those bad practices.
Anyway, maybe its just a long week messing with my judgment, but working with people who don't share the same care for detail or philosophy as you do can often lead to compromises. I'd rather have as much presentation in CSS as possible with one table than the horrible mess shown in that article. Its an easy choice really.
Regards Chris Blown
Jamie Mason wrote:
Tables are for tabular data only, not for use for layouts as a positional grid. The only time tables should be used with CSS is to present tabular data in the content of a CSS laid out design.
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