Comments on: Still throwing tables

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:10:48 +0000

Thanks Douglas. I’ve been using CSS on-and-off for a couple of years now but everytime I attempt to replace tables with CSS something usually goes askew.

Your online presentation is the first resource I’ve found that actually clearly demonstrates proper use of absolute & float positioning. I finally get it, thanks mate.

By: Douglas Bowman

Douglas Bowman — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:00:18 +0000

Sakke: It’s a means of hiding those rules from current versions of IE, since IE doesn’t support the child selectors. Using html>body is an easy way to ensure there’s a direct parent>child relationship. Sometimes, as in the rule your pointed out above, li might not always be a direct child of #nav. But body is always a direct child of html.

By: Sakke

Sakke — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:30:34 +0000

Hi,
I was just looking at your work and went to your css file ( http://stopdesign.com/examples/ms/css/final.css ).
Now I don’t get why I keep finding html>body before each #nav li.
Can you please tell me why this is necessary?

By: Lothar Velling

Lothar Velling — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:04:50 +0000

Thank you!!!
Since two weeks I am trying around without tables and never felt so free before. Feel like having vinced gravity. It will take a while til these teachings take effect on my own homepage (clients come first), but definately will take effective effect. Just once more – THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH for these nice and clear words about this issue!!!

By: BuddhaChu

BuddhaChu — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 12:26:56 +0000

Man…

I just was looking at the table header example code from the presentation (link on page 7) and figured out something I’ve been doing wrong all along and over-compensated for in my CSS (getting a border on the top and left of a table).

Thanx 4 the c0de! I’ll keep that nugget in my cranium for the next time I do some HTML/CSS work :D

By: Ryan Boone

Ryan Boone — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:10:37 +0000

@47
I’ve seen some horribly borked sites on Safari owing to designers only making IE-compliant CSS.

The problem is that they are focusing on IE. IE has a history of little concern for web standards, so it should be the exception, not the rule when developing CSS. I’m learning this early in my career, so I really don’t understand why these corporate designers haven’t led the charge.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 21:48:08 +0000

It seems to me that there’s still too much variance across browsers/platforms to fully embrace table-less designs – especially at the enterprise level. I’ve seen some horribly borked sites on Safari owing to designers only making IE-compliant CSS.

By: mark richman

mark richman — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 21:00:32 +0000

Thanks Douglas. I installed Netscape 8 and everything worked fine. Version 6 sure was flaky!

By: Douglas Bowman

Douglas Bowman — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:00:44 +0000

Mark (44): That’s because Netscape 6 is a horrible browser in terms of CSS support. Many CSS layouts fail in Netscape 6, and barely do better than Netscape 4. Even Netscape admitted that version 6 was released way before it was ready.

Netscape 6′s usage numbers are very, very low. That’s because most anyone who still insists on using Netscape has upgraded to at least version 7, if not the latest version 8. (v7 and v8 are much better with CSS support.) To stay current with any users who still use Netscape, I’d suggest upgrading as well. Or better yet, switch over to Mozilla or Firefox.

Netscape 6 isn’t worth worrying about.

By: Mark Richman

Mark Richman — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:42:38 +0000

I though the presentation was fantastic. However…

When I try to use div’s in Netscape, I wind up with an unreadable screen where areas are laid on top of each other. I am having this very problem with your microsoft page–I instruct Netscape 6 to display http://stopdesign.com/examples/ms/ and wind up with overlays all over the place.

Any reason this doesn’t work in Netscape?

Thanks!

By: James Mitchell

James Mitchell — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:28:29 +0000

Congratulations on 1 Year.

As a self-titled king of Tables, the last few months I have been working really hard to ditch the habit and do full CSS layouts (including the upcoming redesign of my site).

This presentation (first time I saw the presentation version) is awesome! Very logical, simple, and well explained. It has helped my minds eye better visualize the layout, float, and columnar views. Thank You.

Heres to one more year!

By: Niky

Niky — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 11:40:51 +0000

Some nice looking code you got there.

But I think as long as it is possible and easier for webdevelopers to use tables, they will continue to do so. Not that CSS should be forced onto them, but examples like this really show what is possible and also what the commercial advantages are.

Good work!

By: Dustin

Dustin — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:09:06 +0000

The only situations I can see Tables fit is when your doing a site where you want one column fixed in its width and another column to fill up the empty space. Such as my site which I needed 2 columns with a couple of pixels in width, and the middle 100% but the rest is all CSS layed out

You don’t even need tables to do that.

By: Fabian De Rango

Fabian De Rango — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:07:39 +0000

Hopefully, now Microsoft and the rest of the worlds webdevelopers and some users are coming into terms with webstandards and how to use them. Hopefully we will get a IE 7 which is CSS2 compliant, and a Microsoft Website which is cleaner. I find it very hard to show people the benifits of not using tables.

By: samhain

samhain — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:34:59 +0000

Works a treat in Firefox, but the content-extra column refuses to float in IE6. It hangs about at the bottom of the previous column, properly indented, but not floating to the top.

By: Douglas Bowman

Douglas Bowman — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:33:56 +0000

Thanks samhain. Fixed now.

By: samhain

samhain — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:20:50 +0000

Thanks for this. One small quibble, this link seems to point to the css file using "localhost" which makes it come up unformatted.

By: Tinus

Tinus — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:58:44 +0000

Let’s just hope Bill Gates himself is reading this too!

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 03:31:55 +0000

After experience with recoding Yahoo Search, I no longer believe in reworking (in CSS) some other organization’s site, then publicly rubbing anyone’s nose in it by posting the code for all to see

That’s nice. The folks over here would sure appreciate that. Being a developer for Yahoo!, we’re fully aware of the code that needs reworking. You should also take into consideration the year it was developed too. Let’s also not forget why some companies can get away with it: Eg: In praise of Sloppy HTML. Sure there’s arguments against it – and I don’t need to be convinced of them (I agree).
Using the Yahoo! search was quite the attention getter. It’s a simple formula.

1. Choose well-known website
2. Show everybody what’s wrong with it
3. Fix it and tell why it’s better

You’ve made a wise decision not to make public examples anymore. It shows maturity.

Congrats on the one year.

By: Ian Brown

Ian Brown — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 00:33:33 +0000

Great work on the reworking of the Microsoft site. I can understand why you can feel a little apprehensive about posting the code in the public domain, as you mentioned early on within these comments. It’s not always good to show people the errors of their ways, some people don’t take kindly to being shown a reasonably simple solution to a major problem.

However, I find it to be incredibly helpful. And for that, I send many thanks.