[Web4lib] CSS layout issue

[Deborah Kaplan]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Mike Taylor wrote:
> ... and if all that just seems unncessarily complicated, then why not
> just use a table?  Seriously: why not?  I know a lot of computer
> scientists who think CSS layout is more elegant, but I've never met a
> user who could tell the difference.

As a user with disabilities who uses accessibility to navigate, I
can absolutely tell the difference. Accessibility software treats
tables as tabular data, and I can control whether or not CSS is
displayed depending on whether or not it works with my
accessibility needs. It is much more difficult to make to make
tabular layout for non-tabular data accessible to users with
disabilities.

And as a developer, I find it websites which have been coded in
CSS are elegant and simple to maintain. In order to teach a user
to update content, you send them to a simple HTML page which has
minimal encoding. Whereas pages which have been laid out using
tables tend to be uneditable by anyone other than the original
coder, and non-technical users who edit the content in the pages
break the HTML on a regular basis. 

-Deborah
-- 
Deborah Kaplan
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Brandeis University