[Gllug] [OT]Reforming wayward web designers

[Garry Heaton]

Richard Jones wrote:

> Two and three column designs are elegant and
> simple in CSS.  For IE to render things correctly[1], make sure your
> document is XHTML and has a valid XHTML DOCTYPE.
> 
> Rich.

Exactly. Simple 2/3-column layouts are fine but try to reproduce some of the
more complex layouts found on commercial websites. ESPN.com eventually
managed to recode their site with CSS-positioning and it made all the news
but reading their account of the process, it seemed CSS-P couldn't support
everything that was in the old layout.

Once you move away from simple columnar layouts you hit a steep curve of
work-arounds getting widths to work properly, for example. I've seen some
CSS redesigns produce as many nested <div> tags as the original <table>
layout. If I had to put a photo album online I'd use <table>s. The layout is
just more intuitive than the CSS equivalent.

Another thing beginning CSS designers often neglect to test is the effect of
text resizing. Many CSS layouts go to pieces when the text is resized unless
the layout has been carefully crafted. I find <div> containers are much less
reliable than <td>s in this respect. If you add float: into the mix you
really do have your hands full with browser testing. Working round the
browser bugs to get a pure CSS layout for a complex design I find to be a
waste of time that could be spent adding value to the site with
PHP/Perl+database.

Garry

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