[thelist] Are you designing with CSS and web standards?

[Sarah Sweeney]

> It's a lottery whether your design will hit certain bugs; if it does, 
> you can kiss your weekends goodbye. There are more hacks in CSS design 
> than in table based design. How is that better for the web? You have to 
> write conditional rules in your style sheets and hide them from 
> different browsers - there is NO DIFFERENCE between this and code 
> forking in JavaScript to support NN and IE in the old days.

The main difference, in my eyes, is that (with properly semantic HTML in 
place) the CSS hacks you employ appear only once - in your CSS. When you 
use tables for layout, the tables appear on every single page in your 
site. Say you want to make a small change to the layout of the entire 
site: if you've used semantic HTML and properly separated your content 
and presentation, you only need to make a change to your CSS, instead of 
having to change the markup of tables throughout your entire site. This 
is where the major ROI of table-less design and development comes into 
effect.

CSSZenGarden proves that you can make huge changes to the layout and 
style of a site without making a single change to the HTML markup of 
each individual page - this most definitely cannot be done if using 
tables for layout.

-- 
Sarah Sweeney  ::  Web Developer & Programmer
Portfolio  ::  http://sarah.designshift.com
Blog  ::  http://hardedge.ca