CSS Sucks

I'm sorry but I think that the designers of the CSS stylesheet spec should be shot. Why does simple layout have to such a black art? I get a lot of flack for it but I continue to advise people to use tables for layout. I found some support for my views coming from Andy Budd:

I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves writing fairly complicated CSS to do something that would be trivial using tables. Take form styling for example. It’s possible to lay out even very tricky forms using tables in just a few minutes. You can achieve similar results by floating elements with CSS, but it’s a lot more involved. |f you’re a CSS guru it’s all part of the fun. However if you’re a regular mortal and your boss is breathing down your neck because they don’t understand why their “simple form” is taking so long, it can be incredibly frustrating... There are lot’s of good reasons for throwing away tables and adopting CSS based layouts instead. However in their rush to push web standards, many people have overstated the benefits. It’s true that switching a large site to a CSS based layout can save a huge amount of bandwidth. However, for most sites, this saving would be insignificant...

posted to . at Fri May 14 13:33:43 EDT 2004 by david.

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Comments

Miss the Point?

You sound afraid to learn to do things differently by depreciating yourself as a "regular mortal" - as if there is some magic in doing it right. Standards-based CSS design is all about accessibility, portability and the ability to redefine the presentation of your data across mediums. The idea that you should be maintaining separate versions of your information based on the medium used to diseminate it is so 20th century. "Write once, Use Anywhere" cannot be achieved completely by using tables for layout. They were never meant to be used that way, and though you may find it difficult to accept, you will have to learn how to do it, because pretty soon those bosses breathing down your neck are going to want to know why half of their users can't access your form layout on their PDA's, not to mention start questioning the two month time frame you quote to do a simple face-lift. This may not be happening to you right at the moment, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're still designing sites based on tables, not only are you wasting *your* time, you're being entirely unprofessional by costing your clients and/or your employers time and money in the years to come simply because you were too lazy to learn how to design web pages free of the handcuff's that tables put on *their* content.

(Posted by guest: Allan)

posted to CSS Sucks. at Sat Mar 12 03:02:53 EST 2005.

css

I thought pda's were dead. so...the tables showing up on the pda, point is MOOT.

(Posted by guest: bd)

posted to CSS Sucks. at Tue Mar 15 03:01:19 EST 2005.

4 years later and you're still right

outtanames999

It's 2008 and guess what? CSS still sucks.

posted to CSS Sucks. at Sat Apr 19 04:20:21 EDT 2008.

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