CSS is definitely as powerful as table - far more so, IMHO.  However, I do
agree that they seem to have put more time into designing for layouts of
fixed proportions, a'la print styles, than for the more fluid environment
that is the Web.

Consider a print magazine: each page is set up individually and then
produced in quantity for distribution.  CSS would certainly work well for
that we know in advance how much content goes on every page.

Now, a Web site design: we have a single design template that is supposed to
flex to accommodate an unknown amount of content depending upon which page
it is used for.  CSS does allow for this - see the demo I set up earlier or
one of the many similar examples around the Web  - but it does take more
thought than when using tables.

To me, the question is whether the extra thought is because CSS is harder,
or simply because we have years of experience using tables for layout and
far less using CSS?

Does anyone remember the days when tables were first used for layout?
Pre-WYSIWYG days, when they had to be coded by hand?  Seems to me I can
remember floods of table-related questions passing through this list as
little as 2-3 years ago Perhaps the current surge in CSS questions is just
us designers struggling to learn something new...:).

D


----- Original Message -----
From: "David Jones" <dvjones(at)ksbe.edu>

It should be at least as powerful and easy to use. It is
(maybe) as powerful, but it is very cumbersome to use.

I think the fundamental problem is that some people on
the CSS standards teams have decided (for idiotic
philsophical reasons, AFAI can see) that tables must
be used only for tabular data. Coupled with their
apparent (and to me, similarly idiotic and completely
inappropriate) effort to somehow give HTML the exact
positioning et al controls that hard copy media have,
they're producing something that is unnecessarily hard
to use. If your wordprocessor made you use low level
positioning commands to do column or table layouts
(the way CSS does), nobody would use either of those
layouts in hard copy.

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