Veerle's blog

Andy Budd wrote a very enlightening article on his blog about CSS versus tables and why in some instances, traditional table based design can be as good, if not better than CSS and standards based design. It was one of the best articles about CSS vs tables I’ve read in a while.

If you’re like me and only started with CSS designs just a couple of months ago I’m sure you’ll had the same feeling as I do. You’re sweating to get your design right in all browsers and you’re often wondering is this all worthy? Also, when trying to find a solution to the errors, you often ask yourself is this a bug? Or is it me, just not yet fully understanding the way CSS works? In other words, learning CSS comes along with a big doze of frustration :-S

But I can tell you it gets better over time. It’s been 4 to 5 months now since I’ve started with CSS layouts and I learned a lot so far. The “big” frustration is over and I’m confident about creating an entire website in CSS, I’m all for it and I believe it is the way to go, all IE hacks included ;-)

Still, I believe that tables aren’t “evil” as some people claim. I think, if you can avoid a table in your layout then the better, but if in some cases a table is a better option then, why not? Question is of course when do you know this? I guess the answer depends on so many things. A lot of answers can also be found in Dave Shea’s article. I believe you can form an answer once you know everything you’ll need to know about CSS and when you fully understand it.

Take for instance the CSS form that I created some time ago. It is a cool form “look mama no tables” but on the other hand I wonder is this all necessary? Is this worthy? It cost me so much time and effort. Of course I did this just as an experiment and I wanted to learn. But I’m not sure if I would actually use it since it is not 100% “browser-proof”. Sometimes you have to take a step back and see which option would be best. It’s not that if you use 1 table in your page that you suddenly have “bad” code, table tags are still valid markup and can serve its purpose.

Why am I so persisted on using CSS for my layout instead of “traditional” tables? Well I guess it’s because of its light and clean code, its flexibility and if you correct an error in 1 style, then this error is solved in all pages using that style. I like to feel “clean” ;-) It’s a bit like my desktop, I hated when there is too much junk there.