H

Ok, I've been designing websites for probably 2-3 years and I learned from my teacher the table layout method. In fact they still teach that as the method in my school. I constantly see over the internet about how tables are "lame" for a layout because it was not what they were intended for.

One of my concerns with CSS is the lack of compatibilty in older browsers and with Internet Explorer. I've done many things that use CSS that don't work in IE but do in Opera. Is that the case with CSS layouts?

If it's compatible I think I should begin using it to create my future websites, but if not, do you think it's worth learning it now, or should I wait until later?

I do expect people to be on both sides, it seems that way all over the internet. I hear many claims of why each is better, but really when you look at sites made in them you can produce similar results.

What do you all think?

Bigjohn

I'm ok with tables for tabular data - i.e:

picture | description | other info | price

But CSS can be compatible if you stick to the basics and don't try to be overly fancy. There are tons of sites that offer help in this area, including webmasterworld...

It's the fancy stuff (alpha filter, etc) that can cause issues of compatibility.

john

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sam

theres pluses / minuses with both.

i like a hybrid approach. you can build tables, and then apply style sheets for the formatting.

if you go 100 percent CSS you will find lots and lots of your time will be spent trying to make things work the same way in every browser.

imsleepy

Bottom line... you will never please everyone. There are still people out there using AOL3 and IE2. I see them every now and then on my stats and I even have a family member who is still using 640x480 windows 3.1 and IE2. They really do exist.

I build for the majority which is currently IE6.

If you spend your time worrying about compatibility issues you will never get anything completely finished. I know. I have already been down that road.

Bigjohn

Right.

I format my sites to work for IE and Firefox. If it works for firefox, 99% will work for Opera, ANT, and other 'mozilla' based browsers. Oh, and it will probably look ok in Safari too - for the guy still using a mac.

So, by doing so, I've covered about 96% of the people out there.

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Bman

Agreed w/Bigjohn. It's even less trouble once you can get IE6 into standards-compliance mode (which takes a little bit of doing). I do all CSS, no tables at all, and my site looks effectively identical across Opera, Firefox, IE6, Safari, and Konqueror. If people can't be bothered to use a browser released this millennium, then tough tamales for them.

H

That's pretty well what I do now (tables for layout then use CSS is make it look right.) I guess I'm most comfortable with that approach than to learn something new. Although for my next client (fortunately a local friend) I'm going to try doing the layout using CSS to see how it goes.

Yes, I'm quite well aware that people do use those older browsers because of their old computers. My old elementary school just last year upgraded their lab from 486's running Win 3.11.

Personally I think running those older browsers could potentially be a security issue, unless of course back then they didn't have the features that allowed so.

Not to argue or anything, but doesn't Opera use it's own rendering system and not Mozilla? I'm sure I read that they created their own. Though I could be wrong.


So from these posts it seems there's no real advantage to using one over the other. Thanks for your feedback, I think as I said, I'll give CSS layouts a try on my next project.

VTJustinB

Using CSS for layout is where the web really should go, and I think peoples' apprehension about the conversion and backwards-thinking mentalities are keeping it from happening. Oh yeah, and the shrapnel left from the mid-90s browser wars really make things difficult too.

Why Would You Want to Use CSS for Layout?

The big punchline for using CSS for layout is to create centralized layers of abstraction in your website. CSS was invented as a way of separating presentation from content, and it makes sense to take that a step further and separate structure from presentation. Anyone who has ever looked through the CSS Zen Garden can understand the power of CSS-based layouts. With the change of one file the entire look, structure, and styling of the exact same document can change completely.

This is a big win for website maintainance. You want your navigation to be on the left side instead of the right side? 5 lines of code later it's done on every page in your website. You decide that your header and main body need to increase in size by 150 pixels? No problem either. You want to change everything about how your site looks? Don't even worry about your content, just change a few CSS files and voilà.

Hybrid Layouts

The sparing use of tables for layout sometimes makes sense for a project. If you are strapped for time and have to meet deadlines, sometimes the perfect forward-thinking standards-compliant solution isn't always the best course of action.

I think that it has its merits, but the fact of the matter is that laying out with tables puts unneeded load weight on the page (which much be loaded with every page in your website, not just a one-time load like a CSS file), requires maintainance on every page in your website instead of one, and goes against the W3C specification for semantically-correct <table> usage.

This comes at the pro of enabling certain layouts to look very consistent, even in old browsers with poor CSS support.

Caveats and Suggestions

Varrying browser interpretation of CSS is a headache for CSS-based design. It, coupled with peoples' general inexperience with CSS, scares a lot of would-be standards-based designers away from the CSS bandwagon. The fact of the matter is that we will always have to deal with regression-based issues. Some people will never upgrade their technology. But we're really doing the web a great disservice creating bloated pages with non-meaningful presentational markup, javascript and code forks with broken browser detection scripts, or just outright telling a user they can't view your site because it's "optimized for IE 6."

It's really in our hands how the web is shaped, and I think the first step is to recognize that going for pixel-by-pixel sameness in every browser from Mosaic all the way to Firefox 9.3 is counterproductive and expensive. The goal should instead be to develop with standards (as they will not significantly change and all browser developers are now attempting to adhere to them) and with forward-thinking mentalities. Well-structured standards-based website can and will make your content accessible to anyone who views it on any device, and that's what the web needs as it tries to push towards XML.

So I say you should use CSS. I'm a big advocate as its gains are immediate in both maintainability and page weight, most quips with browser inconsistencies have been addressed by the great community of CSS developers that exist, and the bottom line is that if you're picking the lesser of two evils it'd be smart to pick the one that is the future not the past.

Justin

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imsleepy

Justin! who are you!

That was great! You should publish that! It was very informative. Wish I could write a post like that on the fly. When I write something that long it just zig-zags all over the place... this thought that thought those thoughts... a big jumbled mess.

If you tell me you are one of those 15yr olds too I think I will go shoot myself! LOL. Not really. I am just always amazed what these kids know.

Very good post. You sold me!