Proposed Web site redesign (beta)

[Bill Cavalieri]

On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 11:13, Jason Clinton wrote:
> Gerald Combs wrote:
> > In short, I think modern web designers have an irrational phobia of tables.

I agree with Gerald here 100%.

> 
> 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.
> 

The browser on my pda renders tables just fine.  When I had inet on my
phone, it wouldn't render css any better than tables (which was not at
all).  

> 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.

Same problem from above, css only renders in small browswers that
support it, just like tables.  Having worked with people using screen
readers in the past, images not being labeled, and colums without proper
tags were the bane of their existence, not page layout or css.


> 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.

Or create a simple table.  Why everything have to be so hard.

> 
> 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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