Make him look at his site on a cellphone/pda and then do the same with
google.com, msn.com or webstandards.org. There _is_ a difference between
"semantic markup" and "tableless design". Both have value, but showing
someone the values of semantic markup in order for them to do tableless
design is never going to work, obviously. IMHO, advantages are
CSS
- single point of definition for styles.
- makeovers can be done separate from the HTML: there is your biggest
selling point to the non-css and table-minded.
Semantic:
- better search engine results, i.e. better machine readable. That makes
one hell of a difficult demo to show him that. Also unfortunately ;-)
Google is really smart with crappy markup.
- smaller files, less code. For someone editing in FrontPage design mode
this is also completely irrelevant. Very easy to demonstrate, but
usually hand coders are already convinced :-(
Tableless
- viewable on a cell phone. We recently demonstrated this capability for
a room full off managers, and we got ooh's and aah's from the audience
(not from pain, from awe)
- smaller files, less code. See above
- accessibility improvements. Does your guy have any aquiantance that
are blind/color blind?
In short, you can convince him the same way we should all convince our
clients: it's not that our life is happier with CSS, it's their wallet
(makeovers) and their customer's satisfaction (cell phones, quick
loading, high SE rank). So don't show them "how it's done", show them
"what it does".
Michiel
Steve Clay wrote:
Thursday, July 21, 2005, 1:44:15 AM, Brian Cummiskey wrote:
i'm trying to prove a friend wrong that his table/css design is not the
way to do it... so I took it upon myself to show him how its done
If he doesn't see the advantage of semantic markup enough to start learning
CSS on his own, that may be a better place to start. Encouraging him to
use code he can't maintain might not be all that great a favor and I've had
my foot in my mouth several times after showing someone "how it's done".
Just make sure your suggestions are welcomed and that you're not pushing them
into water too deep for them.
Steve
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