Fight for css layout being lost?

[Karl Core]

Aaah, but I don't disagree with you for TEXT FORMATTING. CSS is definitely
an advantage there. My comments refer strictly to CSS for layout of
elements
on the page. I believe the original poster also was referring only to the
tables vs. CSS for layout purposes.

I've seen your website and it impresses me a lot. However, I think you're
an
exception to the rule. The other CSS-sites of some of the purists here are
very simple. No reflection on their talents -- I think it's more a
reflection of the fact that designing complex layouts in CSS isn't as easy
as the "hobbyists" would have me believe. I had never heard of the word
"kludge" before I started studying CSS.

I think the reason for the simplicity you cite is the fact that most of the
regs here (myself included) aren't graphic artists.
I'm personally nowhere near as talented with CSS as some of the regs here
and I've done some things that would make your head spin with CSS layouts on
extremely attractive sites, thanks to skilled graphic artists.

Let's face it, the two biggest reasons why we don't see more CSS layouts is
because "graphic artists" don't understand the web and because most front
end production people don't know enough about CSS. Sites like ESPN and Wired
have proven that.

 

[Guest]

Actually, that's not true. Wired - http://www.wired.com is all CSS. There
are many other, I just can't think of them right now, oh wait, here's a
list - http://www.meryl.net/css/cat_big_sites.php .

Okay, Spacegirl has beaten me to the point here. A quick glance at Wired's
site reveals that it could be done with the simplest of tables and CSS
typography, i.e. banner with 3-columns. As I pointed out earlier, CSS
layouts tend to very simple and I think that reflects that complex
layouts -- the big advantage of CSS -- are, at this time, difficult to get
right.

It CAN be done. I love browsing csszengarden.com to see the lovely
possibilities. But that's a site for graphic artist types working in a
digital medium, i.e. serious hobbyists.

M

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

The other CSS-sites of some of the purists here are very simple. No
reflection on their talents -- I think it's more a reflection of the
fact that designing complex layouts in CSS isn't as easy as the
"hobbyists" would have me believe. I had never heard of the word
"kludge" before I started studying CSS.

I think that the people that favour the beauty and simplicity of CSS
also favour the same in webdesign. Personally, I think a website is
all about it's contents. In my opinion, it's important that the
content is easy to find and pleasant to read. The way it looks is is
secondary.

For many corporate sites, this is just the other way around. They want
it to look good, and whether the text is pleasantly readable is not
that important.

Sybren

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Jeffrey Silverman enlightened us with:

There are many advantages. Just because something is hard to learn
doesn't mean it is bad.

I agree. Some people think LaTeX is hard to learn. It creates
beautiful documents, though.

So, IMO, the one major disadvantage is Micro-fucking-soft's "great"
browser. MSIE 5 had a lot of promise and supported a lot of CSS1
and 2.

Supported a lot? Don't make me laugh. MSIE is the _only_ browser I
know that is so specific in it's understanding of CSS that it can
actually render a page unreadable. I've built CSS 2/XHTML 1.1
compliant sites that rendered fine[1] on any other browser, including
Netscape 3. MSIE was the only one that made an unreadable mess out of
things.

Sybren

[1] With "fine" I mean "readable, understandable and usable". I do not
mean "exactly the same as designed".

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

SpaceGirl enlightened us with:

See what I mean? CSS does not fix ANYTHING. It's just one more bit
of technology that can HELP design a web site, but as with ALL web
technologies it has to be used right. There's nothing wrong with
tables when done right. There's nothing wrong with CSS when done
right. But arhuing that either are a be-all and end-all solution is
just short-sighed and demonstrates a lack of open-minded design
sense from the designer who things they ARE.

Indeed! It's the same as telling people the ABS on their car will
prevent all accidents.

Sybren

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Karl Core enlightened us with:

They have a relatively clean & straight forward design, yet use
about 8 nested tables (3-4 deep), about 50 spacer gifs per page, and
images for almost everything, including stuff like table borders,
headings, etc.

Bad, isn't it? I especially hate those spacer gifs...

The HTML alone is over 100kb on most pages, and they have another
80kb+ of images. I estimate that I can get their HTML down to about
14kb and reduce their images down to about 30-50kb.

I've reduced a site from 17 KB just HTML to 10 KB _including_ the
images

Sybren

 

[Jeffrey Silverman]

[1] With "fine" I mean "readable, understandable and usable". I do not
mean "exactly the same as designed".

This point is an important one. Designers, especially ones with a
background in print media, expect a thing to look as designed in all
media, or, in the case of the web, on all browsers. So do, in my
experience, managers. People designing for the web often misunderstand the
fluid nature of the medium, and that the content is king. But more
importantly, people who *pay* for designs on the web don't understand this.

 

[SpaceGirl]

SpaceGirl enlightened us with:



Indeed! It's the same as telling people the ABS on their car will
prevent all accidents.

Sybren

Man... my typing really sucks today. sorry for all the typos

--


x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Jeffrey Silverman enlightened us with:

This point is an important one. Designers, especially ones with a
background in print media, expect a thing to look as designed in all
media, or, in the case of the web, on all browsers.

This is something I face a lot when talking with our designer.

But more importantly, people who *pay* for designs on the web don't
understand this.

This is a very important issue. People who pay for the designs are
usually the ones who pick a design from a couple of proposals. Most of
the time, they don't know anything about fluid design or user
interface usability. Unfortunately, they pick the design that _they_
think looks good, not the specialist's choice.

Sybren

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

SpaceGirl enlightened us with:

Man... my typing really sucks today. sorry for all the typos

It was perfectly understandable, which is a lot better than some
people's best effort

Sybren

 

[Neal]

See what I mean? CSS does not fix ANYTHING. It's just one more bit of
technology that can HELP design a web site, but as with ALL web
technologies it has to be used right. There's nothing wrong with tables
when done right. There's nothing wrong with CSS when done right. But
arhuing that either are a be-all and end-all solution is just
short-sighed and demonstrates a lack of open-minded design sense from
the designer who things they ARE.

Have you seen on A List Apart where they give SlashDot a "CSS makeover"?
Site seems to be down at the moment, otherwise I'd give a link.

 

[Neal]

People who pay for the designs are
usually the ones who pick a design from a couple of proposals. Most of
the time, they don't know anything about fluid design or user
interface usability. Unfortunately, they pick the design that _they_
think looks good, not the specialist's choice.

Then it's up to the specialist to limit the options to what is good for
the web. Just as the electrician might offer several options, but they all
follow the building code. Or a lawyer might suggest a few courses of
action, all of which are legally founded.

 

[Neal]

Where I work we have a site with around 18,000 pages, all using a mess
of nested tables. To go straight from tables to table-less design is
impossible, however the designers have opted for the "hybrid" approach,
where the main structure (side bar and header) are done using tables,
but the actual content is being converted to table-less, CSS based
design. This is what the BBC have adopted. Once most of the content is
done using CSS, then the designers will make the main structure using
CSS.

I think that's a sensible approach. When the pages are assembled via PHP
or other means, conversion can be easily done in a step-by-step process
like you describe.

 

[SpaceGirl]

Have you seen on A List Apart where they give SlashDot a "CSS makeover"?
Site seems to be down at the moment, otherwise I'd give a link.

The fact that sites like ALA even exist pretty much proves the point.
CSS just isn't a magic pill for good design

--


x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Neal enlightened us with:

Then it's up to the specialist to limit the options to what is good
for the web.

Yep. Problem is, my boss doens't want that, and our designer is a
fixed-everything dude.

Sybren

 

[Jeffrey Silverman]

Then it's up to the specialist to limit the options to what is good for
the web. Just as the electrician might offer several options, but they all
follow the building code. Or a lawyer might suggest a few courses of
action, all of which are legally founded.

while this sounds like it should happen, it doesn't for web
designers/developers. Why is that? I have read philosophies and ideas on
why web designers/developers don't get to act the expert like your example
of electrician and lawyer. Is it because everyone with a computer and a
copy of FrontPage thinks they are an "expert" on web design? Is it because
the web person in the office has so often been Jane, the administrative
assistant who took a two day class on FrontPage (or other similarly
unqualifed individual)? Why does web design or web development not get
treated more seriously as a legitimate area of expertise as compared to,
say, lawyer or electrician? I mean, you would never expect a print
designer to also be the copy editor and 4 color press technician. (well,
maybe some people would expect that). Why are web designers/developers
expected to do the equivalent? I could go on...

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not all bad.

 

[Neal]

The fact that sites like ALA even exist pretty much proves the point.
CSS just isn't a magic pill for good design

I never characterized it as such. CSS is an effective tool for design.
Some say it is NOT an effective tool, and I disagree with them.

The point of citing the Slashdot thing is that the two articles on ALA
demonstrate how simple it is to do a design in CSS that is as good or
better than the table version, and lighter code-wise. Check out the
article.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/

 

[Kris]

CSS does not fix ANYTHING.

CSS *alone* does not make for an accessible website, a usable website, a
maintainable website, a popular website... must I go on?

The company I work for as well as I personally received a lot of praise
from web professionals all over the place for <http://www.cinnamon.nl/>.
They never praised the CSS alone.

Sites like eBay, Yahoo and Google have a lot going for them and some
things about them suck. Overall, they are very successful. My opinion is
that they could be more successful.

 

[Kris]

CSS is great, but it has some limits
which can cause a lot of problems. 100% CSS sites are a LOT harder to
produce, and actually sometimes harder to maintain because of the
delicate nature of browsers.

That is why it is such a good thing to have those 'delicacies' savely
tucked away in a separated stylesheet, so the content producer can
concentrate on the content, the coder can concentrate on the code and
the programmer can concentrate on the functionality. Quite a good deal
actually - I see it work every day.

 

[Kris]

CSS produces inconsistent results across different platforms and
browsers. You can just look at CSS forums around the internet, and
you'll see experienced coders struggling with cross-browser issues. With
HTML tables, it's easy to make webpages that will look good in virtually
ANY browser.

I must say I agree. I've been trying to learn about CSS for layouts and
frankly it's a pain.[/QUOTE]

Simplify. Learn to troubleshoot. Grab a pencil and paper before going at
it.

Tables are dead easy, intuitive,

They were hard when you first learned them. They were for everybody.
Learning a new thing is usually hard.

and are much easier to
debug, if there are problems. I've been visiting some award-winning sites
lately and all of them use tables.

What did they get the awards for?

I've visited a few of the pages of the CSS purists in this group.

Please don't use the word 'purist'. It is insulting.

For the
most part they tend to be very simple -- a reflection of the difficulties of
designing complex sites that work for all browsers, I suspect.

In reality, building a site with CSS requires strongly structured
markup. That is the whole base of it and without it the chance of
succeeding at all is slim.

Once you start structuring, you will understand that a lot of sites
oughta be more simple and that their current structure is more random
than intentional.

Personally, I love simplicity in a design. I see it as a virtue and I
walk that path whenever I am given the chance. I also happen to deal
with designs of people with a different view.

There are
some notable exceptions. I admire Toby Inksters' site. www.csszengarden.com
also features some breath-taking examples of CSS-only layouts as well.

Glad you mention it.

Take a look at these sites as well:
http://www.weeklystandards.com/
http://www.webstandardsawards.com/