Why I Don’t Believe The Tableless CSS Humans
Web design experts claim that tables are terrible and should be 100% abandoned in favor of the moder CSS. What they don’t tell you is that when you get under the hood of CSS, you find that parts are held together with duct tape, bubble gum, or just plain missing.
What Works In IE Seldom Works In Firefox…forget Safari or Opera
I never ceases to amaze me just how many new bugs I find when using CSS. I can get exactly what I want in one browser just to find that
CSS Requires You To Be A TOTAL Master
I’ve been dealing with CSS in “hobby” mode for nearly 3 years now. There definitely isn’t more than a couple of days that goes by where I haven’t made changes to a CSS file on some site, unfortunately. Still after all these years, I run into the appears to be a super simple problem and ends up taking an hour to fix. I’m talking about a link color not being the same in multiple browsers or Firefox not listening to my width requests because it is designed that way.
If you really want to use CSS without wasting tons of time, you must be a TOTAL css Master. If you are missing any piece to the puzzle and don’t understand each and every tool available to you, you are in for a long, disastrous haul.
If You Are Not A 100% Total Master of CSS, You Waste LOTS of Time
Just the other day, I had a list (the thing that uses ul and li tags). I wanted to display it horizontally with an image in the background for navigation tabs. I tried a method where I simply made the li 150px wide and 30px tall to force the li to be big enough for the background image tag to be properly displayed.
Of course, this worked fine in IE but was a complete failure in Firefox. This is usually a red flag that I’ve taken the wrong approach. So, I started searching the forums, made a post at Sitepoint, searched and searched and searched. It took about an hour to find a blog where someone mentioned that all you have to do is add a “float: left” to the li. I didn’t even know you could float an li tag at all.
This blog wasn’t mean to really focus on that problem. This blog was meant to illustrate that I wasted well over an hour just trying to do a simple horizontal list with a background image that looked great in both main browsers.
How Can I Make Money?
I have several sites that I have to run. I have 27 forum posts waiting for my reply at my recording forum right now on top of work on TextLinkCenter.com, Dogsniff.com, and a few sites I’m doing SEO on. I don’t have time to spent 1 hour on a stupid list. I’ve got money to make and things to do.
Faster With Tables
With a few exceptions, I’ve found that it is often much faster to use tables for the basic layout and divs / css for the smaller elements within those tables. Maybe this is just lack of CSS skill on my part, but that is my point. If I can achieve my goal in 4 hours instead of 12, I’m better off with tables, divs, and CSS. If a tableless design costs 8 extra hours, what’s the point?
What Are The Benefits To Tableless CSS Design?
I’m still looking to find the reason. I know that it’s always a good idea to separate the content from the style on a site. I understand this. However, what does that have to do with using a container table vs a container div.
I guess CSS uses less code. This is often true. However, in most cases the differences ins negligible. Who cares if I use an extra 1k on a page. The difference between a 42K page and a 43k page is 0 to be.
I know you can do some interesting tricks like hiding navigation (like they do at Sitepoint), but I’m just not sure that I care about that too much. That’s something that could be handled when a successful site is graphically redone. It’s not something that will make an otherwise unsuccessful site a huge hit. Since most of my sites are in the development process, the last thing I want to do is waste time on candy that won’t directly benefit me.
There Are 500 Ways To Do A Tableless Design
This is a huge problem in my opinion. It’s nice to have options when solving a problem. It’s nice not to have options when there is no problem. In other words, you can repaint your bedroom changing the color once per day. Or you could just like the color you have and move on to a more important problem.
My point is sometimes choice is a bad thing. (This comes from my recording studio background). If you like it, move on. Quit playing with it! CSS offers so many ways to get from point A to point B that it gets extremely confusing. On top of that, you need to figure that each and every method of getting from point A to point B has some kind of downside that you usually figure out once you’ve crossed the point of no return.
What’s All This IE Hack Stuff?
If CSS is sooooo great than why are people implementing javascript to fix “bugs” in IE. I realize that the CSS guys blame IE for this and not CSS. I don’t see this as a “bug” in the IE system, necessarily. I see it as a bug in CSS with IE system that makes the CSS waste more time and effort.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that a Tableless CSS design is a bad thing. I think it can be a GREAT thing. However, it’s only a great thing when it saves time and increases the chances that my site will be successful. This seams to be limited to the 100% CSS Masters.
If you are 100% CSS Master, than you may not agree with what I’ve said in this blog. That’s fine. If you understand all the ins and outs of working with CSS, it probably is quick and easy to get what you want.
However for anyone in the “Less than 100% CSS Master” level, good luck. The ideal utopia CSS is a crock. If you are trying to tackle such an enormously difficult design (like tableless CSS) make sure you have an extra 30 hours to deal with all the problems you run into. Maybe read a book that covers CSS from cover to cover….I wish I would have done that 3 years ago. Maybe I should do it today!
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