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CSS vs Tables

Posted on November 17, 2004 by Mike

Ok, I realize that tables are the way of the past for the web. I see it all the time in my work. I’ve even been getting books (Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets The Definitive Guide)on CSS to try and learn the positioning with that and eliminate tables from my web life. I’ll admit. For some reason for me, the whole CSS positioning thing is going slowly for me. I’m a smart guy, but I’m just not picking CSS positioning up with my usual speed. During my struggles I have one question in my head: Can’t Tables and CSS get along?

Can’t these two ways of organizing data on a website coexist on a single page? I understand that tables can get messy. But if you just use them for certain, more broad organization, they wouldn’t add that much weight to you HTML files.

Maybe the backlash against tables is just because people have finally seen something else as an option. Maybe they will bounce back and create this happy medium that I speak of. Think about it though, if someone had one top-level table and then CSS everything else, would you consider that page, and its maker, back-woods? Maybe…for now.

These thoughts do not mean that I have given up on CSS positioning. I will figure this out. (Hopefully for the next project I’m working on.) …and if a table sneaks in, I hope noone considers me web back-woodsman while I get better at CSS positioning.

  • http://danielcole.us danielcole

    Yeah, I’ve got no problems with using a table here and there to make things line up properly, like in a one-line message header having the title left-justified and the date right-justified. I’ve tried to get the CSS to behave, but no positioning tricks I could do would work. And then the CSS just got bigger and more complex, so then a table (1) Smaller code-wise (2) Code so much easier for a human to read and edit later, if need be. In other news, I’ve abandoned plog and I’m trying geeklog. I hate the current color scheme, and I need to do quite a bit of CSS tweeking, but so far so good. It allows for people (loged in or not) to leave comments, and submit whole blog-messages (display after admin approval for anonymous people), which is exactly what I was looking for. Register an account, and tell me what you think – I’ll give you access to a couple admin-level things.

  • http://danielcole.us danielcole

    Also, what the hell good is going thru all the trouble of making a CSS2 (or even CSS1 for that matter) website when Internet Explorer, the most commonly used browser in the world, isn’t 100% Compliant? Forgetting CSS, can you imagine how the online world would look if IE would just provide support for PNGs with transparency like Gecko browsers do?

  • http://hellyeahbitch.com Mike

    Oh wow. You just commented my thoughts exactly.

    I’ve been making sites at work all day, and fighting IE along the way.

    (I had more here, but I just decided to just make this long comment into another post, becuase I got lazy and didn’t write anything yesterday.)

  • http://danielcole.us danielcole

    Yeah, I’ve got no problems with using a table here and there to make things line up properly, like in a one-line message header having the title left-justified and the date right-justified. I’ve tried to get the CSS to behave, but no positioning tricks I could do would work. And then the CSS just got bigger and more complex, so then a table (1) Smaller code-wise (2) Code so much easier for a human to read and edit later, if need be. In other news, I’ve abandoned plog and I’m trying geeklog. I hate the current color scheme, and I need to do quite a bit of CSS tweeking, but so far so good. It allows for people (loged in or not) to leave comments, and submit whole blog-messages (display after admin approval for anonymous people), which is exactly what I was looking for. Register an account, and tell me what you think – I’ll give you access to a couple admin-level things.

  • http://danielcole.us danielcole

    Also, what the hell good is going thru all the trouble of making a CSS2 (or even CSS1 for that matter) website when Internet Explorer, the most commonly used browser in the world, isn’t 100% Compliant? Forgetting CSS, can you imagine how the online world would look if IE would just provide support for PNGs with transparency like Gecko browsers do?

  • http://hellyeahbitch.com Mike

    Oh wow. You just commented my thoughts exactly.

    I’ve been making sites at work all day, and fighting IE along the way.

    (I had more here, but I just decided to just make this long comment into another post, becuase I got lazy and didn’t write anything yesterday.)

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