Proposed Web site redesign (beta)

[Jason Clinton]

Gerald Combs wrote:
> In short, I think modern web designers have an irrational phobia of tables.

Irrational, perhaps. But well motivated. I realize that the larger 
question that you, as the page author, are concerned with is 'who will 
be using my site?' For the most part, that undoubtably is going to be 
people browsing visually with a full screen computer. Arguably, since 
Ethereal doesn't run on PDA's or cell phones; it will be the only 
audience that matters. And that's fine.

Some pages (like the LUG's), however, have a general information 
conveyance purpose -- again, for the most part, the primary audience 
will be the above mentioned PC browsers. However, if a little extra 
effort could be thrown in to allow the page to /gracefully/ degrade to 
render with sematic meaning on a PDA, cell phone, braile reading, screen 
reader, and spiders then there's a possibility that the time investment 
is worth it; personally, I have become so familiar with CSS that I just 
always do it -- I try to make no assumptions about the viewing audience.

With regard to your troubles with CSS, perhaps I could offer some 
assistance. You are right in your assessment of the myriad of CSS 
'solutions' that exist. Though, it's not a fundamental design flaw in 
semantic design -- those myriad of options have been motivated by a 
fundamental design flaw in IE's box model and IE's 'interpretation' of 
the standard.

For the most part, to accomplish the three collumn layout you described 
with a definitive aspect ratio, you merely use absolute positioning with 
doubly nested <div>'s to work around IE's problems. To accomplish a 
version that adjusts to the browser width is definetly more complicated 
but not unattainable. Again, the cost-benefit ratio has to be considered.

Check out the source of http://www.mozilla.org/ for a moderate 
complexity example of CSS design with an absolute width.

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