Hey guys,
I've just subscribed to this list because i'm a web designer and after reading Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing with web standards" I discovered the wonder of CSS and wanted to learn more and keep up to date.
Thing I have trouble getting my head round is the term "table-less layout". I have started doing entirely CSS based design where I add no design info to the XHTML, and i've had great success, but I've not been able to abandon the use of tables entirely. This is primarily because with tables the row height is always uniform and lush edges (e.g. shadowing) can be easily recreated using empty rows/columns with the correct class.
Also I don't understand where "deeply nested tables" = too deep. For one of my sites I have a 3x3 table for the layout. The outer cells make up the frame of the site, all done using td{background: and then extra tables in the middle-left (menu) and middle-center (content) cells again using 3x3s to give a border (or at least 1x3s with fixed width). Is this bad or is this acceptable?
Maybe I'm taking the term too literally, but its something I need to settle because i'm promoting myself as a professional web designer so I want to make sure I'm pushing my designs to the limit yet still meeting the standards.
thanks to anyone who can help me on this topic. I've got into the habit of checking the source on many webpages I come across, and i've yet to find one with complex design which is without using tables for layout.
Duncan
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