[Webpro] tableless design

[listadmin]

At 09:39 29.07.2004 -0500, you wrote:
>almost had me convinced.  I was writing dhtml to create 3 column layouts
>with all of the columns the same height and all of this...  but the
>conclusion I eventually came to was that css just isn't there yet.

Thanks Jason for this topic.

I'm also still not there yet... After a few purely table-less designs,
for instance http://emilinauen.com/ , which took me a lot of time making
them cross-browser compatible, I arrived at hybrid designs, too.

There are a few, but for me important, things that won't work without
(semantically) misusing tables. For instance: valign="bottom". See here
for an example: http://elrem.ch/ - I really needed to have the text
beneath the image to sit at the bottom of this element, on every page.
Doesn't work with CSS alone   :(

I won't force myself to implement a hack, or any scripting, to do what
a table can do easily here. My new company site (still in the works)
has a quite similar header, and also ends up in a hybrid design: Mostly
divs, and two or three abused tables.

Implement hacks to abandon tables? I wouldn't ever do that. Just little
ones, like the box model hack, so that IE 5 shows the same width as all
the other browsers. As a coder, I like things to be simple. If my XHTML/
CSS pages are more cluttered than with the old-school table grid, I'm
not satisfied. It also happens that I switch back and forth between divs
and tables to arrive at my final solution. And with the CSS eliminating
all the spacer gifs, there is already much accomplished!

>         I've found that combining tables and css really works extremely
>well.  It helps eliminate nested tables, blank gifs, bgcolor="", FONT
>TAGS, BRs all over the place...  But the idea of 100% tableless just
>seemed like it was an extension of the egos of the designers.

We're now taking part of the second wave of absorbing CSS/XHTML and
semantically correct coding. The pioneers and geeks paved the way by
defining navigation lists and other great CSS accomplishments. Now it's
all about implementing it for good visual design, not only geeky blogs.

Some CSS purists sound to me like the usual software ads that promise
everything and hold only 10 percent. It's pure evangelism if someone
argues, *every* site out there could be done without tables. Could be,
but not without new hacks cluttering the code.

To implement these new, better methods we might also have to leave pixel-
perfect design, and things like valign="bottom", which is quite hard for
me... New techniques raise new designs... Still not there yet   ;)

Mike