Wed designers / programmers / authors - read this!

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Asher

Oh...my...God.

Words cannot describe the depths of your stupidity.

I'm so amazed that you seem to think pretty highly of yourself when it comes to technology, but just about every technology thread you post in, you are severely misinformed or misguided, or generally confused. It's like you're in your own little world...

Ah yes, personal attacks.

What else is new? You can't refute my arguments, so you resort to attacking me.

[Asher]

There's no argument to refute, all you've done is thrown out patently ridiculous rhetoric like:

Leading web developers do not design their pages to render in IE.

CSS is faster, because you can do in a couple lines what takes many in HTML (any basic compsci statement would laugh at you for such logic, but you never cease to amaze me)

So no, I can't refute your arguments, because they simply don't exist...

If you're going to assert that CSS is faster than HTML, step up and provide some evidence.

Your "logic" behind why it's faster is incredibly silly, because we can apply the same one to state Java is faster than x86.

[Hot Mustard]

I believe it depends on the page, and the author.

Intricately nested tables forces the browser to evaluate numerous levels of widths and alignments. Using too many styles, especially nested subclasses, can have the same effect. Both slow down rendering.

In my own experience, with well implemented CSS, there is usually a small performance improvement (assuming the original non-CSS version was well crafted). I say "well implemented" because I have seen stylesheets that were crazy, bloated, and just as inefficient as bad table layouts.

[St Leo]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
It will load faster and has a greater chance of success of loading correctly on every browser.

Are you nuts? Sites that rely on tables tend to be much, much heavier in filesize.

As for correctness, it depends on what you are worried about. Tables will degrade better to Netscape4, but CSS will degrade better to Netscape1, Mosaic, etc. because the content will be in a logical sequence. Also, screen readers have a much easier time of dealing with CSS-based layouts.

Who cares about Netscape4 anyways? Mozilla already has a larger market share and Opera has a very, very good engine that's far better than MSIE6's engine with a lighter weight than Netscape4's engine.:P

Plus it's easier to edit

Whatever you are used to is easiest.

[MattH]

I still think that tables are just as vital as good css. Like everything, the're good in moderation .

View: communityhigh.org
Standard design, made good using BOTH.

[St Leo]

Originally posted by Smiley
Which one yields a smaller file size?

With CSS, attributes can be specified once and then reused.

Instead of:
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"

You have:
.blah {
font-family: blah; font-size:blah;text-decoration:underline;
}
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"

CSS is much, much easier to update and saves enormous amounts of bandwidth on even moderately elaborate sites.

You can also then do neat stuff like:
.blah:first-letter {
font-size:42pt;
}
.blah:hover { // only works in good browsers
letter-spacing:1px;
background:#44E;
}

[Mercator]

Exactly... A well-designed CSS/XHTML website has all the style aspects in the style sheet, which means changing the look of your site is easy.

Plus, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft is a member of the W3C. That should mean they encourage web standards, and you can assume it means that whenever their next version of IE will come out (along with Longhorn in 2005, presumably), it will fully support CSS2 and XHTML1 and probably have at least rudimentary support for XHTML2 by then.

Apart from that, CSS also allows many more things that weren't possible before, at least not without scripting.

When the CSS fails, the page still holds together, when the table fails, the page falls apart.

And rendering speed is a non-issue.

Considering all other major browsers are striving for standards compliance, that pulls away the only foot you have left to stand on.

[MattH]

Originally posted by Mercator
Considering all other major browsers are striving for standards compliance,

[Mercator]

OK well... "major", but I'm pretty sure there are dozens of browsers I've never heard of, so I'm talking about Opera and Mozilla (considering Netscape just died).

They can only gain ground in the next few years.

[MattH]

I was lol'ing cause I was thinking of IE and the netscape the schools use.

[devilmunchkin]

i use simple tables to surround a sub-title
check out zybex.com
then go to classes and events and then the link at the bottom. that is the one page i've done so far. (the rest of the mess isn't mine!)

[chequita guevara]

Let's see, on one hand we have a group of professional web designers saying CSS is superior to tables. On th other we have a couple people saying tables are faster and better.



ESPN went to an all CSS layout for a reason, and not because it was slower and worse. They get 40 million hits a day. I think maybe they know something you don't, which is what we've been trying to tell you.

[Urban Ranger]

It's no accident that CSS was instantly embraced by professional designers and developers when it was first released.

Before CSS, it's impossible to maintain any website of reaonable size (I don't mean a couple of pages) with some layout elements using tables, esp. when the layouts are complex. Any changes had to propagate through tens if not hundreds of pages. Sure, WYSIWYG editors and preprocessors helped, but the problem was still there.

CSS solved it elegantly.

[MattH]

ESPN went to an all CSS layout for a reason, and not because it was slower and worse.

Shite that's a lot of javascript.And there is one table

I still say that tables are just fine- unless you're in a real serious web design situation.

[MattH]

And I'll call your espn.com and raise you cnn.com

[chequita guevara]

cnn.com will come over. Now that espn has taken the plunge, we redesigners have a powerful weapon to argue to management about switching.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by MattH
Shite that's a lot of javascript.And there is one table

Well, they still need to handle older browsers and such. Also, tables have legit uses.

Originally posted by MattH
I still say that tables are just fine- unless you're in a real serious web design situation.

Still, table isn't meant for doing layouts.

Besides, most websites already use CSS to control things such as typeface and colour anyway.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It's no accident that CSS was instantly embraced by professional designers and developers when it was first released.

I wouldn't say instantly. It came out in 1996, and since few browsers supported it then, we continued along with our font tags. But now that all the browsers support CSS-1 completely, and CSS-2 mostly, there's no reason not to use them.

[MattH]

msn.com? apple.com?

[chequita guevara]

What about them?

[MattH]

The tables.

[MattH]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp
mozilla.org

You can't have one or the other.

[MattH]

(tables or CSS, that is)

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by MattH
The tables.

Up 'till now, most large websites have been loathe to switch over entirely to a new technology which will inevitabely leave some viewers out. The idea is that even 1% of the viewers have money to spend, but we punish 99% with bloated and kludgy pages for the sake of the 1% who are too timid to upgrade their browsers. Anyway, XHTML/CSS pages can be viewed in old browsers, it just won't look good.

Now that ESPN has done it (just a few months ago), designers can point to it when arguing with management. It's smaller file size, it loads faster, it's supported by 99% of browsers and is forward compatable. On top of that, by changing the CSS only, you can effect a redesign without having to recode hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pages. One CSS file and whatever new images you need and pow! It will make redesigning super easy.

Go here and click on the different examples of design. It's all one XHTML page, using different CSS files.
http://www.csszengarden.com/

[Ted Striker]

sony, microsoft, new york times, wall street journal

[MattH]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Go here and click on the different examples of design. It's all one XHTML page, using different CSS files.
http://www.csszengarden.com/

Wow, that's really quite neat. Merits a LOT more investigation.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
sony, microsoft, new york times, wall street journal

So they still do things the old way. So what? Five months ago, ESPN used tables instead of CSS. They changed, so will the others once their managers realize the benefits far outweigh the one time costs of switching over.

The fact is, the vast majority still use table based layout. Why, because it's what they know. Just like the majority of company still use Windows 98 or Win2K when WinXP is superior. When they have managers like you and Ashur, who don't understand the massive superiority of CSS layout, it's difficult to convince them to make the switch, but i's happening. ESPN is just the first step, but it's a big one.

[Hueij]

Go here and click on the different examples of design. It's all one XHTML page, using different CSS files.
http://www.csszengarden.com/

Hmm... Some of those CSS files don't render right in Opera

[Asher]

That's why CSS is a royal pain in the ass still.

[:) Smiley]

I suspect CSS is a conspiracy by pro web designers to get companies to hire them to redesign perfectly good websites.

With automated code generating programs these days, CSS is not necessarily that much easier to alter than non-CSS.