Dave Winer is asking for reasons why his products should migrate from using tables to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for rendering the design of a template-based dynamic web site.
For me, the choice is clear. Given my druthers, I’d much rather have a template design based on an external CSS (or series of external style sheets) than tables. For what it’s worth, I think internal stylesheets (CSS embedded in a document) are worse than useless. Such implementations are difficult to manage and bloat pages needlessly. If the choice is between tables and internal stylesheets, I’d probably choose tables.
Tables were never intended to be design elements; they were designed to hold information that is best displayed in rows and columns. But, as William Gibson said, the street finds its own use for things and for the longest time, tables were all we had. Migrating to CSS represents change, and we all abhor change.
The big reason not to use CSS is that browsers older than version 4.0 don’t support it. A few years ago, this may have been a viable reason, but no longer. On this site, the percentage of users who use browsers that don’t support CSS has been hovering at less than 2.5% for the last year.
The big reason to use an external CSS instead of tables—and Dave should appreciate this, given his stance on other issues—is that CSS is much simpler than nested tables. Simpler to develop and simpler to maintain. As Brent Simmons clearly states, CSS helps further separate content from design. This is, or should be, the prime directive of content management systems like UserLand’s Frontier.
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