Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

Yesterday, Andy Budd gave an objective look at the seemingly endless battle between good and evil, also known as “tables vs css”. In this article, Andy writes that CSS can be seen by many as hard to grasp, especially if they are accustomed to designing using tables.

Although CSS is a fairly simple language, it can be hard for a novice to grasp many of the concepts like the box model and floats. On top of that, you have to know the various problems in the many browsers and work around them or hack them, or both. Some browsers may not even support much of the CSS that is being used.

Andy argues that some things that could take hours to accomplish in CSS for an inexperienced designer are often times quickly done with tables. Forms are one area where tables come in handy, allowing for easy formatting of input fields and their appropriate labels.

I have long been a fan of tables. I remember the first time i saw CNET with its 3-column layout, and thinking to myself “now why didn’t I think of doing that with a table.” Its probably safe to say that the addition of the table to the HTML language has had a dramatic influence on current web design.

To some designers currently using tables, switching to CSS seems overwhelming. This is where the “hybrid” technique comes in handy, in my opinion. It allows CSS rookies to still control layout with a clean, non-presentational table and learn the ropes of CSS by using it to control everything else, from fonts to padding to colors.

The first site I built as an attempt to design with standards in mind was a hybrid site. But building hybird sites are also smart if there is a large percentage of users with older browsers. Many public schools systems still standardize on Netscape 4 because they may be running some enterprise level software that only supports Netscape.

Dave has given his view on the matter, and the comments he has received are not quite as harsh as I think he was expecting them to be.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2004 at May 13,2004 @ 10:29 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.