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The Site Formerly Known as Bit Working This site has moved to http://bitworking.org

by Joe Gregorio
::: Thursday, February 14, 2002

Cuter than cats. The kids in the middle of a Gregorio family tradition of making valentines day cards for mom.

11:33:52 PM  #  

There is plenty of discussion of CSS vs tables for layout across the net these days.

First off let me say that I am not religious on the subject. I converted my blog to CSS only as a learning experience for me. I really do not care how other people format their pages. I like CSS for layout because it works in a way that agrees with the way my brain is wired. You might not be so lucky (or cursed...).

Some of the arguments against moving to CSS for layout is the imperfect support for CSS on all browsers. To that: I would like everyone to jump into the wayback machine and look at the history of tables in browsers. There used to be the days when some browsers didn't support tables at all. Same for frames. Same for the font tag. The web moved forward then and it will continue to evolve tomorrow. Just look at the exciting technologies coming up: XHTML, CSS3, and SVG. We can look forward to having the same discussions every six months for the rest of our lives.

11:16:53 PM  #  

Austin Burbridge has a design note about CSS. He does raise the challenge of a stable footer on a layout with multiple columns using only CSS. I like challenges.

10:57:47 PM  #  

Joel has a great article about the Iceberg Secret that is right on target. I ran into this exact problem on two projects back-to-back before coming to a solution. In the third project we mocked up the program in pencil drawings only. They were latter scanned in and stored as part of the design documents.

In all those design reviews no one ever asked about fonts, colors, button sizes, etc. Since we were working with pencil drawings it was 'obvious' to all the marketing folks that those things were still malleable and instead they focused on the 'flow' of the program.

We were also very careful in the phasing of the development. While doing the up front design work with the pencil and paper design with the marketing people the software engineers were working on a the guts of the program in command-line driven form. No GUI. Only after the UI design settled down and the core was starting to gel did we (intentionally slowly) start to put a GUI on the program.

10:39:39 PM  #