HTML and the web (contd) : The story with CSS
“No one really tells you why table tags are bad.”
No? To ad nauseum I would have thought.
“In fact, the equivalent CSS for generating something like your standard sign-up form is downright scary.”
Scary to professional web developers!? Gee those artsy farsty graphic design types seem to wrap their head around it OK, what’s up with those Computer Science grads?
“And with every browser (Opera, Fir[e]fox, IE) having a different idea on what ‘right’ CSS is,..”
Well actully its mostly IE that has a different idea from the others about what’s ‘right’. Opera, Firefox, Safari mostly agree. (Perhaps this is simply because IE’s rendering engine ceased active development some years ago.)
“For those using CSS and use divs and floats to build their tables, I ask them why. Why do something that is so un-intuitive? I could teach a kid about rows and columsn. Most programmers won’t understand floats and block elements and why float actually means ‘float’ and not ‘align’. Its crazy!”
In a word IE. We only use floats to make columns because IE didn’t impliment any of the CSS2 properties which would enable layouts using a table metaphor (as Opera, Firefox, Safari have) — Floats really weren’t designed for this purpose, it’s a hack we use because IE didn’t go anywhere near a full (some would say useful) implimentation of CSS2(1998), while Opera, Firefox, Safari ploughed ahead though and now have started on CSS 3.
“Somehow the rows and cells of a good-old table tag seems more alluring.”
Yes, if you think that the Seperation of Content and Presentation isn’t a good idea or that writing accessible mark-up for multiple devices and users with disabilities or that lighter weight code doesn’t justify the small effort it takes to learn how to do it.
Sriram Krishnan, is that hole in the sand free or are you planning on putting your head back in it later.
