Web standards are great. Really, they are. You don’t design a paper or magazine with tables so you shouldn’t use them to design a site, should you? This is what an expanding group of people have been saying for a while now, trying to get us to listen. They advocate the use of divs and CSS to make websites which in theory sounds great - tables take up a lot of space in the markup compared to a simple div.
Practically this isn’t quite so simple. One great example is a site with a column or two. Ideally they should be equal height and have different backgrounds. This is simple enough via tables as the row will expand to fit the largest cell and the background can be changed in no time. The problem with DIVs however is that they will only be as high as needed to fit their content. Thankfully a few clever people have come up with certain ways to almost fix it - a smart border/margin hack and “Faux columns”. The latter only works well on a fixed width which I can’t really live with (especially if I’m on 1280×800 and I need to accommodate for people on 800×600).
The former does work quite well and I’ve decided to go with it for now. I have to sacrifice a fair bit though (I can’t have borders for example) and it doesn’t look as well as it could’ve done on tables. The main point then is whether I should be giving up on artistic aspects to reduce page size and conform to standards or go back to “the bad old ways” as it is often quoted.
The future is bright though with CSS level 3 including multi-column support. Sadly, this has been in development since 1998 and doesn’t look like it’s going to be out for a while. After that we’ll need another decade or so before we can safely use it without worrying about browser incompatibilities.
Sigh.
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