[thelist] arguments pro css & xhtml / con tables

Ben Glassman bglassman at gmail.com
Tue Jun 20 09:04:04 CDT 2006


On 6/20/06, Stuart Young <drstuey at gmail.com> wrote:

> CSS = days of frustrated hair-pulling and researching and analytical
> testing/debugging to get to work (if it's not a simple columnar layout).

When I first started building sites with CSS instead of tables, there
was definitely a big learning curve, and yeah I did spend a lot of
time researchin IE bugs, etc. etc. and pulling my hair out trying to
get a layout to appear the same in every browser we wanted to support,
something that was a lot easier with table based layouts. But once I
got the hang of CSS based layouts, I think they are no harder or more
frustrating that table based layouts, and the benefits of being able
to update them easily and all the other reasons people on this list
have named that they are a better layout solution than tables far
outweigh the initial difficulty of learning them.

Also, the state of standards compliant web development is such that
its relatively easy to find information on most bugs you'd run into. I
recently read Andy Budd's CSS Mastery - Advanced Web Standards
Solutions and there is a great chapter on some of the most common
bugs, why they occur, how to fix them and even how to avoid them
altogether sometimes. If you are willing to spend some time learning
how to do css based layouts, the pay-off is worth it for everyone
(clients, developer, etc.)

Now when I have to update an old website that has table based layouts,
thats when I feel frustrated and want to pull my hair out.

Ben



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