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What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't? If anything, CSS would be worse as its diffic

by ssharp 18y ago

What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't? If anything, CSS would be worse as its difficult to render the same across all the different browsers and platforms. With fixed width tables, you can pretty much guarantee your results. I'm not advocating either and tend to try to use as much CSS as possible but sometimes you spend twice as long to achieve an inferior result. After many years of working with HTML, I think most people find that happy medium.

dpifke 18y ago
In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed. Or that renders as columns for a sighted user but is read aloud in the correct order for a blind user.
- joe_adk 18y ago
  In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.
- neilk 18y ago
  It doesn't, not even in theory. CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.) The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us. An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one. Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text. Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.
Jasber 18y ago
I'm not sure pure CSS designs offer much in terms of usability and accessibility directly. It does help mobile devices, but I think that's still too small for many sites to matter. Plus with more devices that have full browsers, this will become less important. But another side-effect of many CSS purists is also being an HTML purist. This leads to good semantic practices all-around. Things like properly annotating title/alt properties. Or attaching checkbox fields to labels. Making sure the tabindex is in an order that makes sense. As you said, with practice, everyone learns the benefits of each style and develops their own personal medium.
sjs382 18y ago
http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/
run4yourlives 18y ago
What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't? View you page using a screen reader, then ask that question again. There are valid reasons not to use CSS, but accessibility is a clear win against tables, hands down.

by ssharp 18y ago

dpifke 18y ago

In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed. Or that renders as columns for a sighted user but is read aloud in the correct order for a blind user.

joe_adk 18y ago
In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.
neilk 18y ago
It doesn't, not even in theory. CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.) The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us. An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one. Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text. Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.

Jasber 18y ago

I'm not sure pure CSS designs offer much in terms of usability and accessibility directly. It does help mobile devices, but I think that's still too small for many sites to matter. Plus with more devices that have full browsers, this will become less important. But another side-effect of many CSS purists is also being an HTML purist. This leads to good semantic practices all-around. Things like properly annotating title/alt properties. Or attaching checkbox fields to labels. Making sure the tabindex is in an order that makes sense. As you said, with practice, everyone learns the benefits of each style and develops their own personal medium.

sjs382 18y ago

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

run4yourlives 18y ago

What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't? View you page using a screen reader, then ask that question again. There are valid reasons not to use CSS, but accessibility is a clear win against tables, hands down.