Hi Alan, >I think part of this debate is because many developers have years of >experience and know all the tricks of getting tables laid out how they >want.
True to a degree. What you really gather over the years is a pool of knowledge as to the way a web browser behaves and ways to handle that. A browser's display is a rectangular object and our basic way of thinking is to put displayable objects within it as rectangles. The "old way" was to use cells in tables to do that, now we use divs to do the same thing...... The deficiencies of CSS as it stands means that we cannot put things exactly where we want in any complex layout in a way that survives window resizing, browser incompatibilities, etc., so we have to compromise. As soon as you put a div within a div or similar to get what you want then you have put yourself in the same space as the old table layout techniques. The result of that is that content is no longer separated from display, that div-inside-a-div will immediately restrict your options. >For someone new, like me, I'm as well to dive straight in and learn CSS >rather than worrying about "the old way". Most certainly learn the latest, and add to that the historical bits you need to do what you want. (historical aside - some of us have been about so long that we pre-date tables in browsers, and the worrying bit is that it is not so many years ago! <g>) Don't get put off by pedants on either side, designing to cover the current range of browsers is a compromise, so the tools you use must compromise as well. -- Yours, Kym ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
