Proposed Web site redesign (beta)

[Gerald Combs]

mike at handuma.com wrote:

> to them in appropriate fashion. Tables used for layout are "old school," remnants
> of the browser wars of the last millennium. You can catch divitis and/or classitis
> by including a tag like, <div class="thisorthat"> inside a table used for layout
> in order to imbue it's data with meaning. XML tags are semantic. For instance,

Well color me a philistine, then.  If CSS layout is so great, why is it
mind-numbingly difficult to do something as simple as a multi-column
display?  Before you respond and say "it IS simple, you just do <x />!"
note that a quick Google search for "three-column CSS" yields hundreds
(perhaps thousands) of how-to pages that show various approaches that
are either a) complex or b) don't work well.

When laying out the latest incarnation of the Ethereal web site, I
wanted to display three columns of information.  I tried various CSS
layouts.  None of them worked well for me.  The problem turned out to be
the way I size my browser window.  I prefer to have the approximate
aspect ratio of a sheet of paper oriented portrait-wise.  This is what
Mosaic used in 1993.  It's what God and Dwight Eisenhower intended, and
it's what I use today.

When thrown up against a browser window that is (gasp!) narrow, most
three-column CSS layouts fail in some catastrophic way, either by
overlapping content or shifting blocks above or below each other.  After
wasting way too much time trying to get various CSS schemes to work, I
went back to tables.  I'm much happier, and apparently the layout works.
 I've received many compliments on the site and have even had requests
from people to copy the layout for their site.

In short, I think modern web designers have an irrational phobia of tables.