Comments on: Table-Based Layout Is The Next Big Thing

By: STERZILLA

STERZILLA — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:11:46 +0000

@Jamie Mitchell on September 9th, 2008 at 11:43 am

This is a new way to do something old, but that is where I part from your opinion. Layouts with div tags are NOT easy and intuitive when you are doing something nontrivial. Also open-source frameworks are great, but why should there be a framework for creating layouts? CSS is supposed to be the framework/standard that works across all browsers. We shouldn’t need the hack of a framework for a framework.
CSS tables at least make it easier to vertically align text, but I don’t see how to span multiple rows or columns. (Not saying it’s impossible, just saying either I’m a bit dense or it is not intuitive, or maybe it is impossible…) =p

By: Onimok

Onimok — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:23:29 +0000

I think Kevin is really onto something big here. After years of web development using table based design in the 90s and then having to unlearn tables with the advent of web standards and now using css layouts this seems to me to be a perfect solution.

CSS layout is a real pain to accomplish such a simple thing as a few colums with a header and footer, it’s ridiculous. Is the fuss really about the average person (non designer) being able to whip up the 3 column holy grail in a few minutes using css table layout where designers after much blood sweat and tears having to ditch all the painful learning curve experiences needed to produce the same thing? Time to move on I say!!

The html markup can still be semantic and accessible using these layout techniques. I give it 2 years and everyone will be using this technique in some form or another for layout.

It just makes sense.

By: sirCamelot

sirCamelot — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:55:32 +0000

we just need supported actions for CSS3 or 4 for divs to behave similar to tables when needed,
where are tags like overflow:wrap to wrap my content to a width,height I specify and stretch the div vertically, float:center or float-index:1 in order to sort my float divs and easily make columns? Those who started designing CSS functions apparently weren’t web designers…

By: Mikey

Mikey — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:12:19 +0000

Just finished reading the book – thanks, it’s great guys!

I think it’s great that you can use tabular layouts without making your site inaccessible (for example, by misusing HTML tables). I also agree that using “skip links” are more accessible than assuming that screen-reader users want to access the navigation last (can be a nightmare on a long page!)

I’ll be following all of the suggestions you gave, including providing an alternative layout for older Internet Explorer browsers (I had no idea it could be so easily achieved!)

My only criticism is that you could have gone into more depth outlining the need to include “table” and “table-row” display values for correct rendering in some browsers.

Great book and great article – thanks

By: HTNMMO

HTNMMO — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:21:23 +0000

It will take a while for IE8 to gain enough market share to justify this type of change.

Here we are almost a year later and it’s still not feasible to implement css tables.

By now, people have already developed ways to get around this and that’s going to stick. Just like people are still using table layouts.

I prefer css myself and I’ve done tons of table based layouts and I’m happy to be done with them.

I have a related post on how to align three column layouts so that your primary content shows up first in your HTML. For some reason many people have a problem with three column layouts. I can tell by how your page loaded that this sites uses a similar technique to what I described.

You can see examples and instructions here:
http://www.howtonotmakemoneyonline.com/2008/12/clean-up-your-html-code-to-improve-seo.html

By: CSS Police

CSS Police — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:19:48 +0000

Show me an example with flexible source ordering and I’ll believe this is a good idea.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:18:25 +0000

No can do. Both firefox and chrome only support one session across all tabs and windows. From a professional usage point this su.., ah, is a bad thing. The only browser that has session management down is IE.

By: Bill Getas

Bill Getas — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:15:03 +0000

Neat idea: we require users to install firefox or chrome and explicitly ban IE users access. As usual when totally abandoning belligerent creeps: problem solved.

By: Jamie Mitchell

Jamie Mitchell — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:43:40 +0000

It just seems like a new way to do something old, CSS layouts are easy, and we now some fabulous open source frameworks available like blueprint and yui-grids, it is just so easy these days to produce something like a 3 column layout ( or any other layout) that works across all major browsers.

By: PatrickSamphire

PatrickSamphire — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:02:51 +0000

What convinced me to move away from HTML table-based layouts to CSS-based was my experience of having to convert a complex table-based website of around 600 pages to a new design some years ago. It was hell. In the end, I just had to dump the whole thing and redo the content from scratch. It took the best part of a month.

When, a year ago, I had to update the same website to another new design, it took ten minutes, simply swapping the header and footer. Why? Because the CSS was well thought out.

After that, I’ll never touch another HTML table-layout website. They’re not worth it.

CSS table-layout? Now, that does sound more interesting.