A Question to Web Developers

On the other day, I was reading an article on the Site Point, Designing without Tables, using CSS

I am not a professional web designer or developer, so, here are my questions to gurus of this area.

What is the best approach to design a professional web site?

Is CSS is the best? or XML/XSLT etc. approach is the best.

Please also explain with a few words to your answer.

Thank You.

Check out the Web Standards forum for a couple of threads on this very topic. My personal thought is that it's usually best to try to stay near that cutting edge. I've therefore shifted my coding so that it adheres much more closely to XHTML than previously (if it's not quite perfect yet). I've also picked up the ball and run with stylesheets. You have but to take a look at www.csszengarden.com to see how versatile they can be.

I have a little different slant to this. I work mostly server side, where I keep the client side generated code to an absolute minimum.
The requirement I hear the most from clients is that their site also needs to be viewed by not so up-to-date browsers on 56K modem (preferably 28.8K). This means that, most of the time, I do not use the latest technology when it comes to client side scripting and styles.

I am all in favor of table less designs, but for me to make a web forms nicely aligned, I usually grab tables (or more recently the table control in ASP.Net).

I am a big fan of using style sheets to give an entire application the same look and feel, but I have not given up on the ol' html tables yet.

Yep, tables still seem to be the best for writing complex forms. I'm putting the finishing touches right now on an app that actually looks rather like a Microsoft app. While I was able to do this using CSS, creating tabs and subforms using DIV tags and a combination of absolutely and relatively placed layers, I still use tables within each positioning/styling div to align the form elements. So it's a happy mixture. I wrote a class that outputs the div and table code on the fly for me, but a designer could come in and change all aspects of the app's appearance simply by fiddling with the stylesheets.

CSS is much better then Tables for design and CSS positioning is relatively easy to pick up.

On the site that I am working for it uses tables, but only for displaying information, not design. They are also still teh best way for complex forms as was metioned by others

Another route to go might be using photoshop. I have no experience with it but it is one of the things brought up in the web standards (or maybe web design, not sure) thread

Although you say: "here are my questions to gurus of this area" and I do not consider myself as a guru at all, if you haven't already done so, I suggest you download the free chapres of Designing without Tables, using CSS.

As regarding to your question, as far as I know, XML/XSLT are mark up codes that browsers can read and render whereas CSS defines the styles of these.

So the question: "Is CSS is the best? or XML/XSLT etc. approach is the best" does not apply. You could ask such as "is XML the best or HTML or XHTML". If you put CSS in this question, you would be mixing apples and peaches.

If your question is regarding CSS and design without tables, I personally belive that CSS is too fresh to leave the table approach. Even though I'd prefer to use CSS than tables, if I am to address all browsers, I still have to use the table approach.

Iahmed,

In general I don't like dogmatic approches. I do support efforts to support cooperation in general. In my opinion, the standards from the W3C do exactly that! They provide for a set of rules which can (!) assure developers that their users will be able to use their content. Furthermore, their aim is to reach an interexchangeble web (forgive me my language!), with functionality which can be reused (latest technologies) and so on . . . .

All this may seem wonderfull, but the real world is not. Browsers are made by vendors which all have their own interests. Browsers are used by users which all share one common interest: they want to be able to browse the internet, use (extended) http functionality, do anything they need to do, without being bordered by technical stuff. And they certainly don't want anything to do with developers and other aliens!
On top of that it is a good thing for all developers to realize that ordinairy users are the kings of the IT-universe and they are certainly kings of the internet!

So for myself, although I strongly support W3C standards, I will use tables if I think tables will help reduce problems for my users, or help meet my functional requirements in general!!
I want to stress that tables do not necessarily have anything to do with breaking CSS. Thay can perfectly fit in a design which complies to the rules of W3C's CSS. The concept of a table relates closely to the human concept of ordering information. That's why I think, that from a functional point of view, tables can be then best option when it comes to present the user with ordered information. Especially when you want to combine functionality, like presenting readable information in updatable form elements.

So, to answer your question, there is no best approach. But if you carefully consider the intended functionality, combine a pragmatic approach with a desire to be standard complient and most importantly, keep in mind that the your users must be served, you may espect your choices to be satisfactory.


Hope this helps.

Well said blackadder!!! My thoughts exactly.

I agree with blackadder as well. Tables and CCS are far from mutually exclusive.

As to whether to place content in CCS-positioned divs or in tables....there are just too many people with too many wack-ass out-of-date browsers to move away from tables.

I know where I work if I got a frantic call that such-and-such board member couldn't see a site I developed, me suggesting that such-and-such board member get a W3C-compliant browser would not go over real well.

However, I do think developers will move more and more towards doing as much presentation as possible through the stylesheet. It just makes life so much easier. I've been working on our staff intranet at work and using divs and ccs, I successfully implemented a complete round of changes from our designer without touching any of the pages I'd created...

I agree with blackadder too. Good points.

I'ts almost as though we read "table-less layout" and think we have to ban tables. Tables themselves aren't banned, it's using crazy table hacks and deeply nested tables that's frowned upon. Stuff like one row with two cells, and the next with one cell set to colspan=2.

I think CSS is definately where it's at. It makes the code so much more readable, accessible, and easy to change. Personally I think it makes content MORE accessible to older browsers, as really old browsers will just display the content. The key is to make the page display nicely with, and without style.
I've found very little that can't be re-produced using <div>'s, including forms. Maybe I'll post a simple form setup using divs in the Web Standards forum.


And numbernine, I would imagine that such-and-such board member is probably using IE or Netscape. Both which render CSS. The trick is to write CSS that both browsers can render (which can definately be tricky). You're right though, it's all a matter of your audience/client. If most of your users are using an older version of Netscape, and the boss wants it to look exactly the same in an old browser, you may not be able to give up those <font> tags and <table> widths.

XML is more of a data format and XSLT is what displays that data. Similar, but very different than CSS. XML is very useful to transfer data between different platforms. Most big professional sites use some sort of Server-Side scripting language backed by a database to store data. And I would bet that if they're not already using CSS, they will be very soon. The benefits far outway the downsides. ESPECIALLY when a redesign comes around.

I do think in the future CSS tableless designs will become more and more widely used. Creating one standard that all sites should comply to is the perfect solution to solving the cross-browser incompatabilities we face today. As long as we have a standard companies like Microsoft, Netscape, etc will slowly make their browsers compliant to this new standard. I myself do not like how Microsoft IE has alot of it's own CSS tricks that are not compatible with other browsers.

I myself would certainly like to start using CSS tableless designs, however I find it hard to make the change. Designing the past few years with tables has made it a habit hard to change. Most users probably find tables much easier than CSS to make their design look the way they want it to.