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Hello again
Well, here it is: the third version of this blog. The first one was done with MovableType; then I moved it to WordPress; and now, I’m still using WordPress, but created a new template and moved it to a new location.
In fact, it’s not as if I changed the site, but rather it was engulfed by my new website – labs.zeh.com.br, the place where I’ll be putting all my non-commercial projects from now on (instead of scattering it around other websites).
One thing I should say is that, although I don’t work much with HTML nowadays – I do use it, but of course 90% of my work revolves around Flash – I decided I finally wanted to make a website that was pure CSS, using all that new, shiny tableless-jingaling-Web 2.0 stuff you can think of. Just to be cool, you know. So I’ve done a simple layout on Photoshop, and when I started cutting it and getting it to HTML, CSS simply couldn’t do it. I had a fixed width column (on the center) and some liquid columns (on the sides) that I needed to properly align the background the way I wanted, and all sorts of hacks and column layouts and holy grails in CSS couldn’t even begin to make it work the way I wanted (same height, the liquid columns to have a properly aligned background, etc). The only way to do it was with some huge CSS hacks, including a lot of scripting. A real mess.
Using tables, I could do that with no sweat at all. Just one single table row, no hacks, and it would be compatible with all browsers.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally dig using styles, I’ve been using it since day one, but is that the advantage of tableless, CSS layout? Having so much work for something that I could otherwise make in around 10 seconds?
Anyway, I ended up tired of that all and instead of giving up and using tables (like I did in the past) I gave up and built an extremely simple website instead — which is, well, this one. Featuring CSS styles and three image files only. It works and it’s efficient enough. Less is more.
Comments (1)
Yeah, positioning elements with CSS is still a difficult (and often cumbersome) task; CSS3 is expected to provide better ways to position elements in pages.
But the biggest advantage of the web-standards philosophy is accessibility. The idea is to benefit the end user, even though it may sometimes make the developer’s work harder. In the end, CSS is a very useful tool to developers, but using tables for positioning once in a while is unfortunately still necessary.
Posted by Eduardo Omine on 30/Jul/2006 at 12:49 pm