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abbeyvet -> RE: Tables or CSS? (5/12/2003 12:00:48)
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One point to bear in mind is that many of those articles, and many of the articles on the web about CSS in general, were written in early 2002 or in 2001. Things have changed a good deal since then.
At that time IE 5 was the most up ot date browser, NN7 had not been released and Mozilla, Konquerer, Opera etc were all a much smaller part of the browser scene than they are now. In other words support for CSS layouts was way more patchy than it is now.
It is still not perfect, but the number of people using NN4 has decreased considerably and general browser support for CSS has greatly improved.
I don' t think there is any reason why clients should come back at you, as Erin says, they are happy with their sites and their sites work and for the foreseeable future will continue to work.
BUT I do think that, like it or not, everyone needs to start accepting that using tables for layout is no longer the best way we have at our disposal to layout pages. We are going to have to grapple with CSS layouts sooner or later and there are compelling reasons why it should be sooner.
These are my reasons for more or less completely moving to css layouts:
1. Because CSS means better accessability
Using CSS does NOT mean your site will be unusable in older non CSS compliant browsers. That is one of the beauties of CSS, if the browser does not understand something, it ignores it. OK, it will not be very pretty, but it will be usable.
And that is the key - using CSS means that a site, the same site, same pages, same code, can be accessable and usable to those using special adapted browsers, hand held devices, in fact pretty much anything to view the site.
2. Because Standards Compliance MATTERS!
It is not some esoteric aspirational thing - it matters to us all. How often have we lamented the fact that what works in one browser will not in another etc etc? Well, if we do not support the standards, by using them and working with them, then we have only ourselves to blame.
3. Because it is more efficient.
CSS is a marvellous tool for the lazy! [;)]
A site created with a CSS layout can be totally, and I mean totally, redesigned in next to no time, just by changing one file, the style sheet.
As an example of this I had a site recently, pretty far into constuction with maybe 40-50 pages in existence, when the owner said, " You know I think it would look so much better if everything that is on the right side of the main text on the pages was swapped with the stuff on the left sde."
So in less than a minute, by editing the style sheet, I swapped them, on every page. The owner hated it, so a minute later I had swapped them back.
No big deal - but try that with tables! Once you get used to laying out pages with CSS, doing it with tables seems impossibly confined and rigid, CSS spells freedom!
Yes, there is a learning curve and a steepish one, especially if you are not comfortable with HTML or basic use of CSS; no, FrontPage (or any other editor I know of) will not do it for you; and no, sites laid out with tables are not about to become unusable any time soon.
We tend to forget how new the Internet is, how quickly it has changed and developed and will continue to change. Tables as a tool for layout were never really anything more than a clever workaround, they were never intended to be used that way but the rapid and wide adoption of the web meant that in the absense of any other way of making pages pretty they were the best tool available. Now they are not the best tool available, CSS is. The use of tables for layout, in the longer term, will most assuredly become obsolete and the time when we used them will represent no more than a blip on the radar, a brief period when we had to make do with a less fully developed standard.
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