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**Urban Ranger** · August 18, 2003, 02:16

Originally posted by Asher

Oh...my...God.

Words cannot describe the depths of your stupidity.

I'm so amazed that you seem to think pretty highly of yourself when it comes to technology, but just about every technology thread you post in, you are severely misinformed or misguided, or generally confused. It's like you're in your own little world...

Ah yes, personal attacks.

What else is new? You can't refute my arguments, so you resort to attacking me.

**Asher** · August 18, 2003, 16:11

There's no argument to refute, all you've done is thrown out patently ridiculous rhetoric like:

**Hot Mustard** · August 18, 2003, 17:03

I believe it depends on the page, and the author.

Intricately nested tables forces the browser to evaluate numerous levels of widths and alignments. Using too many styles, especially nested subclasses, can have the same effect. Both slow down rendering.

In my own experience, with well implemented CSS, there is usually a small performance improvement (assuming the original non-CSS version was well crafted). I say "well implemented" because I have seen stylesheets that were crazy, bloated, and just as inefficient as bad table layouts.

**St Leo** · August 18, 2003, 17:20

Originally posted by Ted Striker
It will load faster and has a greater chance of success of loading correctly on every browser.

Are you nuts? Sites that rely on tables tend to be much, much heavier in filesize.

As for correctness, it depends on what you are worried about. Tables will degrade better to Netscape4, but CSS will degrade better to Netscape1, Mosaic, etc. because the content will be in a logical sequence. Also, screen readers have a much easier time of dealing with CSS-based layouts.

Who cares about Netscape4 anyways? Mozilla already has a larger market share and Opera has a very, very good engine that's far better than MSIE6's engine with a lighter weight than Netscape4's engine.:P

Plus it's easier to edit

Whatever you are used to is easiest.

**MattH** · August 18, 2003, 17:26

I still think that tables are just as vital as good css. Like everything, the're good in moderation

.

View: communityhigh.org
Standard design, made good using BOTH.

**St Leo** · August 18, 2003, 17:30

Originally posted by

Smiley
Which one yields a smaller file size?

With CSS, attributes can be specified once and then reused.

Instead of:
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"
font face="blah, blah, blah, blah" size="blah" blah="blah"

You have:
.blah {
font-family: blah; font-size:blah;text-decoration:underline;
}
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"
span class="blah"

CSS is much, much easier to update and saves enormous amounts of bandwidth on even moderately elaborate sites.

You can also then do neat stuff like:
.blah:first-letter {
font-size:42pt;
}
.blah:hover { // only works in good browsers
letter-spacing:1px;
background:#44E;
}

**Mercator** · August 18, 2003, 18:04

Exactly... A well-designed CSS/XHTML website has all the style aspects in the style sheet, which means changing the look of your site is easy.

Plus, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft is a member of the W3C. That should mean they encourage web standards, and you can assume it means that whenever their next version of IE will come out (along with Longhorn in 2005, presumably), it will fully support CSS2 and XHTML1 and probably have at least rudimentary support for XHTML2 by then.

Apart from that, CSS also allows many more things that weren't possible before, at least not without scripting.

When the CSS fails, the page still holds together, when the table fails, the page falls apart.

And rendering speed is a non-issue.

Considering all other major browsers are striving for standards compliance, that pulls away the only foot you have left to stand on.

**MattH** · August 18, 2003, 19:18

Originally posted by Mercator
Considering all other major browsers are striving for standards compliance,

**Mercator** · August 18, 2003, 19:31

OK well... "major", but I'm pretty sure there are dozens of browsers I've never heard of, so I'm talking about Opera and Mozilla (considering Netscape just died).

They can only gain ground in the next few years.

**MattH** · August 18, 2003, 20:10

I was lol'ing cause I was thinking of IE and the netscape the schools use.

**devilmunchkin** · August 18, 2003, 23:34

i use simple tables to surround a sub-title
check out zybex.com
then go to classes and events and then the link at the bottom. that is the one page i've done so far. (the rest of the mess isn't mine!)

**chequita guevara** · August 19, 2003, 22:38

Let's see, on one hand we have a group of professional web designers saying CSS is superior to tables. On th other we have a couple people saying tables are faster and better.

ESPN went to an all CSS layout for a reason, and not because it was slower and worse. They get 40 million hits a day. I think maybe they know something you don't, which is what we've been trying to tell you.

**Urban Ranger** · August 19, 2003, 23:02

It's no accident that CSS was instantly embraced by professional designers and developers when it was first released.

Before CSS, it's impossible to maintain any website of reaonable size (I don't mean a couple of pages) with some layout elements using tables, esp. when the layouts are complex. Any changes had to propagate through tens if not hundreds of pages. Sure, WYSIWYG editors and preprocessors helped, but the problem was still there.

CSS solved it elegantly.

**MattH** · August 19, 2003, 23:04

ESPN went to an all CSS layout for a reason, and not because it was slower and worse.

****e that's a lot of javascript.And there is one table

I still say that tables are just fine- unless you're in a real serious web design situation.

**MattH** · August 19, 2003, 23:06

And I'll call your espn.com and raise you cnn.com

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