Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout

Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by briancooley on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @01:32PM (#464392)

Context-sensitive Presentation, Better Accessibility, and the most complex designs are easier with CSS. These seem to fall under the YAGNI rule. In particular, if it took me a couple of hours to build using tables versus a couple of weeks using CSS (see the Ron Garret post), the above listed benefits would be cold comfort for the wasted time.

The first rule should be to get something working quickly, even if it's suboptimal. And the jury seems to still be out on the suboptimal part.

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Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by KrisJordan on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @01:56PM (#464427)

The jury is not still out on whether tables are suboptimal. They're easier, that's their only advantage.

The rule of getting something working quickly should not increase the cost of doing it right in the future.

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Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by briancooley on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @04:28PM (#464715)

What's optimal depends on your objective function. For Ron Garret, it appears that his objective function was "most intuitive." When smart people are on both sides of an issue, I consider it undecided.

I personally prefer using CSS for layout, not because it is more intuitive than tables, but because I prefer to remove the table-cruft from my html. I think it makes php and rhtml files easier to read. However, in the limited freelance work that I've done, I've run into more than one client that preferred I use tables because they couldn't or didn't want to maintain their layout with CSS.

Anyway, that discussion is ancilliary to my point, which is that the benefits offered by the author aren't going to be convincing to someone who sees a 40-fold or so difference in time-to-production.

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Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by cedsav on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @03:01PM (#464547)

They are actually not that easier to use. More intuitive perhaps, but they have enough quirks on their own.

I briefly taught a web design class and I remember students struggling with their table-based layouts. Layouts would be inconsistent from one page to the next because of content stretching the cells, and they could never figure out why dimensions set on a table or cell would be ignored by the browser.

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Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by GHFigs on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @02:16PM (#464454)

The amount of time it takes, and how suboptimal the result is depends on the design. There is no reason you can't create a decent design in a few hours using either.

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Re:Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout by cedsav on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @02:25PM (#464473)

By all mean, do what you feel more comfortable with, but working with CSS is not necessarily slower than using table layouts. You just need to get over the learning curve.

[edited]

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