[email protected] wrote:
to them in appropriate fashion. Tables used for layout are "old school," remnants of the browser wars of the last millennium. You can catch divitis and/or classitis by including a tag like, <div class="thisorthat"> inside a table used for layout in order to imbue it's data with meaning. XML tags are semantic. For instance,
Well color me a philistine, then. If CSS layout is so great, why is it mind-numbingly difficult to do something as simple as a multi-column display? Before you respond and say "it IS simple, you just do <x />!" note that a quick Google search for "three-column CSS" yields hundreds (perhaps thousands) of how-to pages that show various approaches that are either a) complex or b) don't work well.
When laying out the latest incarnation of the Ethereal web site, I wanted to display three columns of information. I tried various CSS layouts. None of them worked well for me. The problem turned out to be the way I size my browser window. I prefer to have the approximate aspect ratio of a sheet of paper oriented portrait-wise. This is what Mosaic used in 1993. It's what God and Dwight Eisenhower intended, and it's what I use today.
When thrown up against a browser window that is (gasp!) narrow, most three-column CSS layouts fail in some catastrophic way, either by overlapping content or shifting blocks above or below each other. After wasting way too much time trying to get various CSS schemes to work, I went back to tables. I'm much happier, and apparently the layout works. I've received many compliments on the site and have even had requests from people to copy the layout for their site.
In short, I think modern web designers have an irrational phobia of tables.