I finally had some “spare” time at work today, so I re-worked the layout of our huge data analysis web site using CSS styling and layout rather than the original old skool methods we used when we first built it many years ago.  The original design was done back in about 2000, and I didn't have alot of time to do it, so I just threw it together.

I've had a fair amount of experience in the last couple of years with all-CSS layouts.  My favorite place to learn is CSSZenGarden.  Anyway, the benefits of separating content from presentation are well known, and CSS is not the only method of decoupling, so I won't really go into why I was doing it.  Although I did come to the conclusion that CSS is lacking some things that would make what I was doing much better.  Anyway, I did do some searching for some examples when I couldn't eliminate a stray pixel spacing here and there.

What I found was alot of people raving about having no tables on their site.  Personally, I think that's a little silly.  Not to say I'm not impressed by what people can do without tables, but that would be like me saying, “I built a house, but I didn't use any bricks” and expect people to be impressed.  Certainly, there are many houses built without bricks.  Very functional, beautiful, well-built houses.  But you can't build a brick house without bricks.  Most people who brag about not having any tables don't realize why they would want to banished tables other than they read someone else bragging about being table-free.

The point is not to rid the earth of the table because it's evil. Tables are perfectly fine for identifying content as being part of a table, after all, you don't replace all the images on your site with thousands of tiny DIV tags perfectly sized, colored, and positioned to replace every pixel.  That sounds silly, but I've seen people do the equivalent of that in trying to replace a table in the quest of table-less HTML.  The point is to organize the structure of the content so that it can be interpreted as simple data, and can then be “styled“ for presentation.

Well, looking back over this entry, I find it to be one of the most lame entries ever.  Oh well, I feel better having griped about that.