Bert Doorn said: > Quick reality check.... What do most people use when visiting a > website? What do clients who pay the bill want?
Once upon a time it was NN4, now it's IE6, and tomorrow who knows? And that's the point of designing to web standards. As for what the client wants, I say it's two of: good, fast, cheap. However, I doubt very much that the big driver is the visual design Bert, and I doubt most people visiting or commissioning a web site give two hoots as to how its built. Most people want to provide, or gain easy access to, content that is *supported* by a visual design that communicates values that are important to them and makes the site easy to use. For the record, the people paying my bills *do* want standards based design - I'm working in e-govt - and they want content that is usable by people, and *easily* manipulated by machines. To refine my point a little: web sites look the way that they do is because we design them like that for no other reason than they are familiar (with real world things, and web designs from the past 10 years or so). Nothing wrong with that. But, given we've moved on a little bit from last century, isn't it about time our designs did too? If a 2 column CSS layout with a band of color down one side is difficult to implement with todays technology, shouldn't we instead look for designs that work with the technology we are using? > On those sites that use tables nested to the nth degree you're > absolutely right. But a simple 1 row, two (or three or ... column > table with solid background colours (via CSS) is likely a lot lighter > than multiple divs, background images, hacks, conditional comments, > javascript etc. > yes, it's true you can make your CSS and JS files unneccessarily huge, but setting a background on one or two div's *still* uses less code than the equivalent markup for tables. > And since we live in the real world, where real people use those buggy > browsers, we do what works best. Sometimes that means a table. I > agree tables SHOULD not be used for layout but it's not a crime to use > one occasionally especially if the non table approach "adds unnecessary > weight to the design". > Hmm, are you implying that I don't? =) No, it's not a crime, but really if your design needs a table in the strucutral layer to support the visual design, should you not revisit the visual design? kind regards Terrence Wood. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
