An alert diveintomark reader pointed me to this discussion at Steven Garrity’s site, which answers two questions at once (who is Steven Garrity, and why should I care). Steven is a professional web designer who wants to convert his personal weblog to XHTML/CSS, but is hesitating. It looks like he will end up doing it anyway, if only to say to potential clients that he can. But the discussion is both informed and balanced. Sample:
There’s really no technically sound argument for prefering to keep whole page content inside of tables that isn’t tied to something specific in the mechanics of a particular display agent and these arguments are few, as well as temporary.
The problems were forseen before the popular use of tables for layout began, but it happened anyway.
It is only confusing, now because of having developed a preference for, and wanting to continue, working with what is familiar. Yeah, it’s annoying to have to change your way of thinking about layout, but getting over it is not really too hard. You just do it.
If Steven (or others) want to move to CSS but require Netscape 4 compatibility, I would recommend reading A Backward Compatible Style Sheet Switcher and reviewing this Netscape 4-compatible, tableless, CSS-based, liquid, three-column layout.
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