[Web4lib] Gracefully degrades to..?

[Jonathan Gorman]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, 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.

And when you need to change layout dynamically?  It's much more of a pain 
to do it when you have a table-based layout.  Anyone who's had to do 
post-processing on a table-layout system (think OPAC) will know the pains 
of having to look in the fourth cell of the fifth table to get some 
information.

Not to mention at the least those that might want to change your website 
to make it better suited for themselves.  Are there many of us?  Probably 
not.  Might we be able to come up with better designs if we can hook 
things into the process?  Maybe.

I've also mentioned this before, but I'll say it again.  I've never, ever 
seen anyone suggest that css layout is easier or "great".  It's got some 
significant annoyances.  One can tell it is a standard created before two 
actual implementations existed.  It's still better than tables though.

Jon Gorman