I hate CSS and php hacks.

I hear ya.

The hybrid approach (tables for layout, CSS for style) is really the practical approach these days. The “benefits” of using CSS instead of tables seem to be awfully close to zero, and the resulting difficulties are (as you noted) huge.

As for separating presentation and content, with WordPress they’re already separated. The content is in the database, and the presentation is in the PHP files and CSS. And in WordPress 1.5, almost every theme seems to have its own custom version of the PHP files. So what IS the real value of using CSS instead of tables?

I can’t say I agree with the points you’re making here. Tables-as-structure is illogical, non-semantic markup that makes life difficult for anybody not solely reliant upon vision when browsing.

Even if you just write off that section of the population (which, let’s be honest, can be very tempting to do if you don’t have a personal interest), a table-less design still makes more sense from a purely common-sense point of view.

After five years of hacking tables into shape just to get a bloody menu to display properly in various misbehaving browsers, it’s an absolute joy to be able to quickly and easily style up a list and have it look how I want. And the code is a darn sight (site? Never know which…) better to look at / work with as well.

In terms of backend technologies, I can’t really comment with much authority - in my own (limited) experience, .NET seems to produce big steaming piles of invalid crap unless you beg and plead with it to do otherwise, and PHP can require a fair bit of hoop-jumping at the best of times.

And finally, with regard to browser hacks - IE is a pain in the arse. No question. The majority of my time is spent wrestling this putrid piece of software to the ground, but that’s no reason to write off CSS as a technology. Write your stylesheets for decent, clean living browsers (which, ok, may have the occassional bug, but they’re very few and far between), and then include the IE hacks from another file.

Then one day, maybe, IE will get it right, and you can just delete that import statement.

One last thing - if table-less XHTML and CSS is just so impractical, then why are so many sites using it successfully?

I hate CSS and I hate CSS zealots more. The more they go on and on and on about CSS being easier and the future like a bunch of mindless zombies the less I want to use it.

I hate not being able to define constants.

I hate having to define the same properties more than once.

I hate not having any inheritance. I cannot make a class that is based on another class, I have to type out all the properties again.

I hate that you can’t do any maths within CSS. It would certainly help make things more readable to be able to do something like: width:100% - sidebar_width;

I hate that, dispite the zealots’ claims, you do not have clean separation of content and style except in the most basic of examples.
I hate that there is only one box model. Why can’t I set something to be 50% the width of the screen including its border and margin without wrapping it in an extra set of DIV tags?

I hate that there is no relation between DIVs so that equal height columns becomes a mess of browser specific hacks.

I hate that there are no vertical alignment options as there are with table cells, you have to mess about with negative margins.

Whenever I’ve brought up these issues I am always told that CSS is easier, it’s the future, you need to design differently, the problem is with IE not CSS, use Firefox…

So yes, I hate CSS too.

I **king hate CSS now. I really tried to embrace it, learning all the necessary stuff, reading the books doing the tutorials… yet every time I make a site, something so rediculously bizarre happens to what used to be a very simple opporation with table layout. I understand the reasoning behind it… however, it is so clunky and seemingly backwards that in 2007 we are having to use allsorts of tricks to get even a basic layout to look decent… its like building a house with no walls, no bricks, just bits of invisible thread and having an external machine of rediculous complexity to describe to the house how to arrange its walls and the furntiure inside… but in case we get visitors from different walks of life we need to have different instructions for them incase they get offended by the mess that it looks through their eyes. Well, CSS, I have spent a year believing in optimism that it is the future, it must be used instead of tables… now after seeing the Manchester Utd web site completely fucked up in my Firefox on Mac browser, designed by the best web design agency in the world… I think you can safely say that CSS is FUCKED. Until something is done to sort it out, I’m using Flash and tables. So Fuck you CSS… move on. Standards snobs can stick their blocky sites firmly up their boney arses and unless your site is specifically for disabled then why should everyone else have to suffer in-case someones site-reader gets confused? Thats not what its about, its about code snobs wanting to be cool.

‘One last thing - if table-less XHTML and CSS is just so impractical, then why are so many sites using it successfully?’

If you do this for a living in a small company you might realise why they are so freakin impractical.

Large corporations have a lot of money and might be able to afford wasting hours of fanny arsing around with layouts to make sure they are with the ‘in’ crowd.

Small bespoke companies have tight timescales and have to bid for work against tough competition, if we included full css markup in our work we would have gone bankrupt ages ago and more people would be without a job.

Great idea, but it doesn’t work!

I’m in business not on a standards crusade, so I’ll use the way that makes me the most money . Customers wont pay more for a CSS design than a table design, so tables it is for me. Customers have NO CLUE what the difference is, and care even less… .and don’t someone say CSS is more accesible, because that’s rot, just try blindfol ding yourself and actually try using a screen reader on your favourite CSS site, see howthat works out… Accesibility comes with logic design and workflow, not with source code.

As for browser compatibility, well I dont have any worries, and I never need ANY code to differentiate browsers. ASP.NET adaptive rendering sorted that years ago. I have NEVER written a page that validated that didnt work in all browsers when using table design.

Dont winge about browser this or that, raise your game and have the courage to ignore the bogus mess that is CSS

I feel depressed today… I have been messing with CSS on and off for the last couple of years (since 2004). Recently I started to feel confident with it, but today once again I ran in to a difficulty. I wanted to do proper rounded corners with CSS and guess what? There is no standard way to do it. It’s so annoying to have to read a bunch of long written “papers” online to do simple things like this. Books are a bit more direct but it’s still a pain. What am I supposed to do, use 8 or 9 separate divs for each side and corner? How is that better then using a table?

I’m thinking maybe to give a last chance to CSS… If there is a JavaScript book like “How to make CSS work easily using JavaScript” I might consider giving CSS a second chance.
Or maybe wait when CSS3 is supported by all major browsers (like in 10 years).

I don’t know what to do since it seems that to remain competitive one must be able to work well with CSS-P (table less layout). I think CSS is a major TRAP that web designers happily got in to.

You are 100% correct. I’m tired of reading articles based on the theoretical precept that “separating content from layout” is the holy grail of web design.

I’m tired of the CSS “snobs” who insist that anything but pure CSS is somehow a deprecated hack for “properly” designing a web page and not using CSS for everything somehow relegates you to amateur status as a designer.

In theory CSS is great. In practice it is an utter abomination.

CSS tables? Hardy har har har.

The standard element will never go away. Ever.
It will ALWAYS be supported by any browser because so many web sites in existence use tables and always will. The web would “break” if tables were ever not supported.

CSS has its uses and overall can often accomplish things not easily done with traditional HTML or even DHTML.
However, the reverse holds true. There are tasks that can be easily accomplished with traditional HTML that would require ridiculous CSS hacks to achieve.

Ever look at the .css source files for medium to large sites? (like eBay for example). What an undecipherable mess of spaghetti coding.