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Web design: CSS vs. Tables
Back when Netscape Navigator
4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to
lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would
require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver
and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support
CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.
After the browser wars subsided,
and the dominant browsers such as Internet Explorer became more W3C compliant, designers
started turning toward CSS as an alternate means of laying out their pages.
CSS
proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout.
Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps
bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page.
All modern Web
browsers support CSS with different degrees of limitations.
However, one of the
main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially
relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different
page display.
This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same
subset of CSS rules.
For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing
Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done
with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity.
For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements,
such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute
positions.
With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, designing
with reasonable adherence to standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1
or CSS 3 to properly structured markup.
These days most modern browsers have solved
most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts
possible.
However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need
to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers.
Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according
to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that
holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium
has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web design.
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