Old School
I've been working on creating a site for me "day job" the past many days. And in trying to keep up with the latest web design recommendations I've learned that writing HTML tables to lay out a web page is now considered bad. The thing to do these days is use CSS DIV tags and the like to make your site look real purdy. So for those that haven't a clue what I'm talking about here's a quick explanation. To layout a web page you used to create a tables (or many of them) so you could place the pictures and text in just the right place. Kinda like this simple table:

Stuff Here

Other Stuff Here

So this was the old school way to do it. Now you're supposed to use cascading style sheets (CSS). This technique lets you define specific area on the page and then apply different attributes to them. Kinda like this:



So here's the problem: Style sheets don't work the same in every browser. What might look one way in Internet Explorer will look different than in Netscape, and what looks one way in Netscape 4.0 will look different in Netscape Navigator 7.2. There are tricks to make things work in most browsers but I just don't think it's worth it if I can accomplish what I want using tables and not alienate customers on my sites. So I'm sticking with the old-school tables. This might make me look out of practice to those that actually analyze my code, but for most users, I don't think they're going to care.
- posted by Drew @ 4:33 PM