[Web4lib] Gracefully degrades to..?

[Roy Tennant]

CSS layout mafia? I find it hard to picture Thomas Dowling taking a  
baseball bat to anyone's kneecaps over their lack of CSS use. But  
then, I've been wrong before.

I find it surprising to look at the calendar and note that we are  
well into 2006 and we have people advocating the use of tables for  
formatting non-tabular information. The use of tables for layout was  
a kludge to get around the lack of a real layout mechanism. CSS is  
that mechanism. To advocate a kludge when a better, more standards- 
compliant, and very effective solution is available is, well, backward.

I'm not saying that everyone should run out and change all their  
pages that currently use tables for layout -- lord knows I no doubt  
have many such legacy pages myself. But I really don't think anyone  
can justify creating new content using tables for layout given the  
wide implementation of browsers with decent CSS support.

Having said that, I must caution that you can do more damage with bad  
CSS than you can with bad HTML, so how it is implemented is key. But  
done well, your web pages will never look cleaner, easier to  
understand and edit, and be compliant with the latest standards.  
What's not to like about that?
Roy

On May 24, 2006, at 9:43 AM, Mike Taylor wrote:

> Jennifer Heise writes:
>> Can you recommend a good book on using CSS for positioning that
>> DOES degrade gracefully? I've really avoided using CSS-based layout
>> myself because I've seen it degrade horribly so many times, and I
>> don't want to take a chance on my users seeing all the text piled
>> on top of each other.
>
> I quite agree.  I know that people go on about how great it is that
> you can use CSS for layout, but I've never seen the appeal, and I
> prefer to use tables for layout and CSS for, well, style.  The result
> of course is that my sites _do_ degrade gracefully -- much more
> gracefully that CSS-layout sides do on browsers that don't implement
> CSS properly (which is not rare).
>
> So I think you should quietly ignore the advice of the CSS-layout
> mafia, and lay your pages out using good old-fashioned tables, at
> least for the next few years.
>
>  _/|_	  
> ___________________________________________________________________
> /o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http:// 
> www.miketaylor.org.uk
> )_v__/\  Live fast, Die old.
>
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