Tee, have a look at one more: <http://vivabit.co.uk/articles/wsbp/> - I thinks it was not mendioned yet.
One of the first points on that web site is: "Sites built with web standards take less time to develop"
I have to disagree. Trying to lay a site out with CSS can be very complicated and time consuming, given all that hacks that you have to research and use in order to get things to look right and work right across multiple browsers.
Table layout, on the other hand, is straightforward and simple. It might be more complicated to maintain when you come back to it a while later and have to work out the nested table colspan'ed layout and make an adjustment to it.
However, would a CSS layout be any easier to come back and maintain? (I don't know, I'll find out in a while I suppose.)
Here is something that annoys me too - people dismiss table layout because basically, using tables for layout is not what tables are intended for. Therefore using tables for layout is a 'hack'. However, whenever you try to use CSS for layout, you find out you have to use various 'hacks' to get it all to work right. Therefore, you negate on of the main reasons for using CSS layout in the first place.
Not only that, newer CSS versions introduce tables into CSS! Reinventing the wheel anyone?
Is it just a case of CSS layout (and browser's implementation of it) not being mature enough yet to really trust and use fully, or should we carry on regardless with it?
An example of a hack is to use a background image behind the layers of your 3 column layout. Surely the proper thing to do should be to specify background colours in the stylesheet, which is a lot easier to maintain than changing an image's colours and widths. Plus it often means that you are building in fixed column widths, not recommended usually in an ideal world.
Here's another thought - is using floats to design things like 3 column layouts a hack in itself? Shouldn't relative positioning be the proper way to do it? Maybe not I just ask :-)
Please don't shoot me down in flames for these views! One of the things I
like about this list as opposed to another list I am on is that you people
discuss these issues in an open, reasonable way and acknowledge such problems. I look forward to your replies! :-) It helps me with my understanding of CSS, web design and the best way to carry on designing.
Stephen
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