whats the best way / tool to create a website that's built from fancy tables?

[shamrock]

hi,
can anyone suggest me on a good way or tool to create a website that's built from nice looking tables?


I'm looking for a tool that for instance, can create tables with images inside themm (like rounded corners) and borders, something that can handle complicated designs well...

Thanks

[mattjacob]

Firstly, I'm a hand coder, so any program to do this would be out of the question. Secondly, I don't use tables for layout, and especially not complex nested tables. I use CSS.

[Skunk]

Sounds like you want Dreamweaver. I'm with Matt - I don't find using tables for design necessary any more now that modern browsers have decent enough CSS support for CSS positioning to be viable. CSS allows for cleaner markup, better accessibility and faster loading times - the only disadvantage is that you generally end up having to "hide" your styles from NS4 leaving it to render the page in boring (but perfectly usable) unstyled HTML.

[shamrock]

does anyone then knows where can i find tutorials for using CSS instead of tables?

I have Dreamweaver 4.0, but I'm not sure whether it can do what i'm looking for... if it can, can you tell me how?


thanks

[Skunk]

I have hardly any experience with Dreamweaver - DW4 should be perfectly capable of helping you generate table based layouts though. If you're interested in using CSS for layout it's probably best to code by hand rather than rely on software, although Dreamweaver MX and Layout Master (from www.westciv.com ) have both been recommended in the past for working with CSS. If you want to learn more about CSS for layout I suggest the CSS Panic Guide: http://thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/css/

My weblog also has quite a bit of information about CSS layouts in its [X]HTML and CSS category: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/categories/markup/

HTH,

Skunk