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Table tennis

February 14th, 2002

It’s like I’m at a tennis match, watching the Tables vs. CSS battle, head swinging back and forth. Point to Tables! CSS ace! Table Fault! Reminds me a bit of the goto wars.

I was telling Tim this morning that when I did a CSS redesign on my site , I had a bunch of teething trouble trying to get it to look how I wanted it to, so I ended up just seeing what it would do if I did this or that and letting its behaviour guide my design decisions, so rather than me using CSS to implement a design, I built something that would look ok in CSS. Of course, I’m not a designer.

CSS is a great thing to use, to understand, to implement, but there’s no reason on earth to abandon all tables and immediately rewrite your intranet online expense sheet so some dork can use it on his cellphone or from WebTV. That’s not your intended audience.

As a scripting guy, I tend to use what gets the job done. As Rick says:

I learned HTML with tables, font tags, cute midi files, and spacer gifs too. But, I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity of web design using CSS. No more weird table structures, just a neat DIV structure. I’m still learning, too…

disclaimer :: this site has tables because I’m an anal bastard and don’t want a liquid 3 column layout. I want a nice two column layout because I hate reading text in wide columns in high res displays. And, I like centered websites. And I’m lazy and haven’t come up with a suitable CSS replacement just yet. But hey, Supasite’s admin portion is XHTML compliant…

He’s got the winning attitude. Interested in getting it right in the long term, but determined to make it work now.


I’m blogging on my radio site too. Trying to figure out where I’ll end up doing most of this.

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