Table based web design

[Metho]

Fitz, in his usual in-ur-face style, plonked the following comment into a thread;

"fucking tables based web design. EEEEVIL."

Now I'd really like to know why he, and any of you, think this is a fair statement. While many forums discuss this topic over and over and over, I'd simply like to know what our guys have to say about it.

Some of you know that I've been a web designer/developer since finishing Uni. To this day, I cannot see any valid reason for making the transition to full CSS design.

The reason being, full CSS design is incredibly buggy with inconsistent results x-browser. Complex liquid layouts are simply destroyed by full CSS layouts and can even disrupt server-side applications from performing properly.

I have wasted many days of production trying to debug full CSS layouts. Mind you, I only do liquid layouts; so that makes page architecture far more complex than fixed designs. Designing in full CSS requires knowledge of current browser hacks, page rendering, the DOM and style inheritance. Without it, a designer can easily give up in frustration.

In every instance I've had to resort to table structures to loosely contain header, footer and content blocks. However I do adhere to complete separation of style from structure and valid html. Since all browsers do not render to standards, table based design is the only way to produce fast, consistent results without having to invest months in training for advanced CSS.

Full CSS is only suited to basic layouts or fixed position design. Beyond that the designer has to learn all the advanced CSS, hacks, and html DOM in order to get x-browser consistent results.

Tables work. Tables are fast. Tables are easy. Tables are cheaper to work with and will make you more money. If used with 100% standard html & CSS, they're also future proof.

[reki]

When I was making websites (I don't do it any more), everyone made table based layouts. Its only over the past year that I've seen a couple of guys on the Relic forums go on about full CSS layouts. Its like internet browsers.. for some reason, some people seem to get a bit obsessive about these things. Having said that, I can't make too much comment, because I haven't tried it.

[Drahl]

I am a graphic designer / web designer by trade and I while CSS based sites have their benfits, the majority of the time it's just not worth the effort. Especially when you have a tight bidget to stick to; a site that I could build in an hour with tables might take a day of fiddling to get just right with CSS.
There is a time and place for 100% CSS, but for the majority of the time table based sites are fine IMO.

I certainly don't think that CSS should be pushed aside. If you can do a site in CSS as opposed to tables then it would be beneficial to do so. Not only does it feel good when you accomplish it :P but it will make changing the design/layout site wide relatively simple.

Of course, this is just my opinion and I'm sure there are CSS die-hards who would disagree with me, and you're welcome to.

[MagpieFL]

sure, ofc.

was that Linear B?

[LordRule]

web development is all i do, ive never done a site in full css, nor have i ever wanted to. I can think of too many issues that will show its ugle head. Ive never done a site that i didnt use at least 5 tables per page.

Athough in school we never learned full css, mostly tables so i guess im a little bias. Tables to me just seem more structured and a standard (to me at least) on the web now a days.

[fitz]

/me lobs a casual handgrenade in and wanders off whistling...

Heh, i've just spent the last month reading the Zen of CSS Design which is the book written by www.csszengarden.com creators about the project. I'm just being my usual idealistic self, which is why my current home browser is the latest firefox beta which supports columned divs in CSS and haven't used IE for ages. I know it's a minefield of compliance and cross-browser support but i've also come to really appreciate the elegance of CSS as a design tool. As somone who as a matter of course hand-codes still (when i do any) the idea of hand writing tabled design horrifies me. Of course the likes of dreamweaver and fireworks make this a doddle. but i still grimace when i hit view source on a site and see {TD} <td> tags stretching off into oblivion.

The one thing that i really wanted to post here i can't find. One of the major US broadcast news corps made the full transition to CSS about 6 months ago and i can't remember which fucking one it was. It's eithe NSBC or who-the-fuck ever but there was a really interesting article about it by the design house who did the job.

Anyhow, glad i stirred the fire up a bit ;0

[fitz]

I was going to edit my post. But that is a great example of how evil tables are.

[reki]

well yea, but it could have had the same effect if you had used a div class style tag when html was enabled.

[Metho]

Fitz, many overly styled CSS designs are even worse than table layouts as far as the code goes. Instead of the td's, you're seeing div's and classes on practically every line. I can code much more elegantly using tables and CSS more efficiently via DOM inheritance than CSS id's and class names. Both the source and CSS files are cleaner because in using DOM, you're styling tags hence precluding gazillions of class and id declarations.