Proposed Web site redesign (beta)

[Gerald Combs]

mike at handuma.com wrote:

> I investigated some sites purporting to be authorities on web standards and
> found them using tables for layout, for example, http://www.webstandards.com.
> Other sites, however, were trueblue, http://www.alistapart.com. When I scanned
> the source code at http://www.w3c.org, I was pleasantly surprised to find it
> wasn't laid out with tables. It doesn't make any difference who's example the
> club follows as long as you live up to your potential.
> 
> I'd like to design a three column layout that collapses as gracefully as Gerald's
> ethereal.com.

I'd love to see a CSS layout that fits my requirements.  It'll be
interesting to see what Jason can produce.  However, I'm still trying to
figure out what path the web design world used to get from the
description at the top of http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

  "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be
   shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community
   boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with
   participation from a large number of researchers and industrial
   partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF),
   which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and
   URIs for naming."

to

  "...but don't use tables for layout, or else the whole thing comes
   crashing down!"

If the sematic web can't survive tables, how can we expect it to survive
_real_ threats such as metadata corruption?  And I'm still trying to
figure out how 200 lines of CSS are supposed to be better than 10 lines
of table markup.


BTW, the tables-vs-css controversy has apparently been going on for a while:

  http://www.decloak.com/Dev/CSSTables/CSS_Tables_01.aspx