Re: CSS replacing tables for format

At 00:18 24/04/02 -0400, Mike Taylor wrote:
>It's an admirable goal, but as we've seen, the use of CSS as a replacement
>for tables is not realistic just yet in terms of cross-browser
>compatibility.
<snip/>

Browser compatibility is a slightly fuzzy term. Sometimes people use it to 
mean "Looks the same in Netscape 3 and 4 and IE4 and 5". In reality, a page 
is cross-browser compatible if the information contained in that page is 
just as available in a range of browsers.

One of the problems with the first point of view is that you can never have 
a page looking exactly the same in a range of browsers. The second problem 
is that it implicitly assumes that there are two strands of browsers, with 
a linear progression along the strands. There are actually far more 
browsers than just Netscape and IE, and there will be more in the future. 
Getting a page to look even approximately the same across the whole range 
is literally impossible - there is no way http://aamcf.co.uk/ will look 
even slightly similar on my 19" monitor and my Palm m500, not forgetting 
how it will `look' to Google and Home Page Reader.

For real cross browser compatibility, you have to use markup correctly - 
use H1 for top level headings, P for paragraphs etc.. Part of this correct 
use is not using tables for layout. It is not always possible, but it is a 
lot closer than people usually think. I'll do a tutorial on this sometime, 
possibly even today (if I have time).

>There seems to be this belief that once we get these so-called "standards"
>in place, all the browsers will be designed to exact W3C
>specifications...yet that's an unrealistic ideal.   Microsoft, Netscape,
>Mosaic, etc. are vying for customer attention and so each designs something
>unique to make their product stand out (usually in the form of
>browser-specific tags or other "features").

Fortunately, that is not the case any longer.

All browser vendors now recognize the importance of standards. The days of 
propriety DOMs and browser specific elements are quickly becoming a memory. 
This is partly because vendors realize that standards compliance is a 
feature in and of itself, and partly because there are more and more 
platforms that people browse on, making standards compliance essential.

Andrew

--
http://aamcf.co.uk/

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