Why is CSS still not widely used for page layout
Why are so many web designers/developers still using tables? I see new website designs all the time and when I turn off CSS in Firefox very little changes. Most designers seem to think CSS is there to replace the font tag or make header tags look better. CSS1 has been around since 1996 and CSS2 has been around since 1998. Tables were never intended by the creators of HTML to control the layout of a web page.
Using tables to control the layout of a page shows a lack of professionalism. It also makes things a lot harder when you have to do a redesign or have to make changes. Using lots of tables makes very ugly code. When you use CSS your writers can very easily make changes and additions to the website. There is no reason the source code for a website should look like a C program. A non-web designer can write an entire website and hand it over to a designer and the designer will not have to make hardly any changes to the copy with CSS.
There are many excuses why people don’t use pure CSS. All of them come out of the fact that people are lazy and stuck in the past. The biggest excuse is that CSS is hard because IE does not follow the rules. The rules that IE don’t follow are known and well documented and easy to avoid. Those who don’t get with it and learn CSS will be left behind and struggling to find jobs like Pascal programmers or Windows NT server administrators.
I wonder the same thing too, but the biggest reason I get is the lack of absolute precision of layout with css. With tables and images you have absolute control of the end result much like a printed magazine page. With CSS browser issues and CSS hacks get used and the end result ends up a little different. The CEO gets “annoyed” that the rest of the world doesn’t see exactly the same thing as he does, so to solve the problem we end up with images and table.
In reality, CSS layouts/designs are not difficult. They can get a little complex, but that’s only for advanced stuff and anything can be complex when you get to a certain level. Simple or basic CSS layouts are much less problematic than the same thing in tables and simpler to debug. Oh yeah, and they do save a bit o’ bandwidth. I think the greatest thing about CSS layouts, is how easy it is to slowly expand it into something more complicated and beautiful. Try expanding a table’d design and you get all these weird nested tables that take a lot of time to work up or a lot of time to debug. That’s been my experience.
I agree – whenever I find a site that’s still in tables it makes me think less of the designer or the site. Get with the times, people!
I think the reason people dont use CSS is becasue of a lack oh knowledge. They simply dont know how to create it.
Hi
I think this is because of lack of knowledge over CSS.
Interesting article.
Thanks for sharing here.
CSS is fundamentally flawed with respect to layout because it requires the developer to express the layout in terms that are relative to a CSS concept of “normal flow” in which rectangles extend either left to right ( om variation of “normal flow” ) or one block under another ( the other flow variation ). There is no concept of models. Just this stupid “normal flow” moving reference point. So I know exactly how to make CSS do what I want but the code is totally astonishing. I mean the negative numbers in the code to get the position you need. Using a moving linear target as a reference is absolutely ridiculous. Something that addresses CSS’s mission is certainly needed but CSS itself should be scrapped and a decent technology built in its place.