On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Ron Koster <[email protected]> wrote: ------------------------- > > Message: 2 > Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:06:01 -0500 > From: Ron Koster <[email protected]> > Subject: [css-d] The CSS Overlords > To: [email protected] > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > > At 02:20 PM 1/14/2009 -0500, Bill Brown wrote: >>Well, tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. That is, they can be >>used together, though using them for layout is generally frowned upon by >>the CSS Overlords. > [SNIP]
> I'm curious: why is this approach "frowned upon"? Please don't get me > wrong, because I do fully understand that the *goal* of CSS is for > the purpose of layout, etc., and tables were never really meant for > that, but at the same time I can *easily* create a site using tables > and have *no* cross-browser/platform problems at all -- on the other > hand, I've attempted to create sites with CSS layouts, and have only > ended up with a thoroughly buggy site. Perhaps I just don't know CSS > well enough to know what I'm doing, but having now been on this list > for a few months now (since last July), it seems like practically > everyone has innumerable, sometimes insurmountable, problems in > attempting to do so -- when quite often many of these problems would > simply "disappear" if a table had been used for layout instead of CSS. > I'm coming in to this discussion a bit late, so my apologies if required. That said I can think of more than a few reasons why CSS based layouts are far superior to Table based approaches. Most of them have already been discussed, but one of more important reasons is speed . CSS pages render about 1/3rd less time than table based layouts, Doug Boude, and Joe Gautreau tested this a while back, for the details see http://www.twoninemedia.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/4/19/TabledLayoutsvsCSSLayouts. Using the Web Page Analyzer at websiteoptimization.com the authors found that the CSS-based layout was 33% FASTER than the table-based layout on a T1 connection. I found that rather difficult to believe, so I tried a more rigorous test using JMeter and 100 simultaneous connections. The load test confirmed their findings, on average the CSS pages rendered much faster than table based layouts when under a significant load. This speed difference was maintained going from 5 through 100 simultaneous users. One of these days I'm going to have to blog about this. regards, larry -- The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B. F. Skinner - ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [[email protected]] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
