Typography
Thursday, August 29, 2002[12:11:05 PM]
Sanity from Zeldman, inanity from Microsoft. Spake Zeldman:
"More and more, we find ourselves creating transitional layouts that incorporate simplified table structures; use sophisticated CSS to add the kind of details that used to require nested tables, spacer gifs, and other presentational hacks; and serve a basic style sheet to 4.0 browsers that approximates the display in modern ones."
(Back to J. R.'s comments here...) In fact, tables for page layout -- setting up columns -- are more accessible than using CSS positioning for divs. "Accessibility" software, like humans, have no trouble finding which table cell has the "content" of the page.
Heck I have an aggressively stupid script that works 90+% of the time just by using regular expressions to find the contents of table cells, and then only displaying the contents of the cell with the most text (not counting hrefs).
Zeldman:
"And it's not just 4.0 browsers that make pure CSS layout a pain. We get 50 letters a day from IE6 users complaining that they can't read the full text of A List Apart articles. A bug in IE6 cuts off long text in any floating div. Since 'float' is essential to CSS layout, any site that uses it to format long passages of text will be broken in IE6.
"The bug affects only some percentage of IE6 users. But that's like saying it affects some percentage of the population of China."
J. R.:
Given the wide range of incompatible CSS implementations in browsers, it's quite a trick to pick which features to use. Clearly given the Zeldman's IE bug, you shouldn't use CSS layouts for IE.
A better approach is tables for page layout, prevent Netscape 4 from seeing the stylesheets at all, and use very light text formatting in CSS. Alas, the most interesting CSS features are only available in Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Netscape 6+, etc.).
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/8/02; 11:27:21 AM.