Back when I first started hand coding websites, it was all about tables.  Designs were cut up into squares and laid out in rows and columns.  This was ten years ago, oh how I miss those days…

While most of the world has moved on to CSS based sites, I just can’t be doing with it.  Don’t get me wrong, I have tried to embrace some things in CSS, navigation for instance, and divs for e-commerce sites have made my life a huge amount easier, but I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Today, a colleague was having issues with a 2 column layout.  To get 2 columns to stretch to fit the content, remain the same length, and have a footer that stays underneath them requires at least 4 divs, and 3-4 lines of CSS for each one.  A table requires 6 lines.  It does the job without any hacks, and remains the same in all browsers.

This brings me on to my second issue with CSS.  Almost every CSS site I have ever seen has some degree of hack to make the site look correct in all browsers.  Is this because browser makers are being lazy, or is it that CSS based design has opened the door to slapdash ‘designers’?  Either way, why make life difficult?  If a website needs columns, why not use the method made for it?

I use a combination of the two.  I normally use a container div, with a table inside that to split it into safe, predictable columns.  Then I style my TD’s and sometimes have divs within my tables.  People from the tables camp and people from the CSS camp probably look at my code and cry, but it works.  I don’t get issues that I have to fix with a hack.  Sure, you have to think about Internet Explorer, I mean you can’t even put a body tag on a page without IE8 screwing it up, but I don’t have to deal with items being a couple of pixels out of place.