June 6, 2008

Benefits of CSS Layouts

Web Designers get better results with stylesheets by learning them as a design technique in their own right, rather than blundering around with the idea that they're meant as a replacement for mis-used tables and/or invisible gifs and/or HTML3.2 etc.

Stylesheets are better for proposing presentation, because in principle they do no harm when their suggestions are inappropriate. If the stylesheet causes a problem in a particular situation, then the user can intervene: that's part of the design concept for CSS.

Stylesheets are, at least temporarily, worse because of the dreadful implementations that are out there, necessitating extra care in design - but it's getting better all the time, and one can shield obsolete implementations from the more risky parts of the CSS by various techniques.

The problem with table layout is that you're stuck with it even in situations where it makes no sense (think accessibility, in all its senses). Where, on the other hand, tables are used to express an actual relationship between the cell contents ("tabular data", to put it crudely) then they are doing their proper job in HTML.

No comments: