On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Ron Koster wrote:
-
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:06:01 -0500
> From: Ron Koster
> Subject: [css-d] The CSS Overlords
> To: css-d@lists.css-discuss.org
> Message-ID:
> 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 [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org]
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/
