Comments on: Epicycles: are complex css layouts the new nested tables?

By: ¿Así que querías saber (casi todo) de CSS? | WEB 3.0

¿Así que querías saber (casi todo) de CSS? | WEB 3.0 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:27:32 +0000

[...] Epicycles: Are Complex CSS Layouts the New Nested Tables? – Bruce Lawson [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:33:08 +0000

Maybe a little late to add to the discussion. But cant W3C build a css/xhtml rendering library which browsers can use?

I don’t really see anything in the idea of another browser developed by W3C cause we already have opera which is pretty standards compliant. An external library common amongst all browser would eliminate rendering differences wouldn’t it?

Perhaps make this library as an open source project? All browsers could automatically update to the last stable version.

I too hail from the table-layout-era. I’ve gradually made the switch to css-based layout and I’m running into the same crossbrowser issues we all are. It’s time for the Browser manufacturers(NOT just Microsoft) and the W3C to push web-development to the next level and make css mature.

By: TomFunk

TomFunk — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:21:43 +0000

I love my job (web design) and it would be so nice to come to work, design a site that looks nice in one browser – safe in the knowledge that it will look the same in all of them, sadly that is not reality.
Most of my time is spent working around not only browser incompatibilities, but also same browser – different OS ones for which you cant rely on CSS only hacks. Life’s a bitch when FF WIN looks fine, but then you look at FF MAC and FF linux and they are different.
Browser and OS sniffing is unreliable also.
What really chaps my ar*e hole though is that its the web designer that gets the wrap for it all the time, we all work damned hard to make a site work and look well.
At the end of the day I sometimes feel like web design sucks, and want to do a different job, and that is the biggest shame of all, because if all designers did this, it would be left to the dev guys to build sites and the intorweb would be thrown back to 1995.

By: fragrances

fragrances — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:31:39 +0000

Interesting that you brought up physics — because this dilemma reminds me a little of the way physics has developed over the last 150 years. So let me indulge in my pretentious analogy. There was a time when everyone believed that light was a wave. Based on all the tests done up to that point in history, it had always behaved as though it were a wave, and so there was no reason to believe it wasn’t so (simplest explanations, like the problem with epicycles). Then someone came up with an interesting experiment that hadn’t been tried before, and that demonstrated that light behaved like a particle. That is, it wasn’t one continuous stream, but rather several individual bursts. Both sides conducted experiment after experiment and both could easily prove their own side. What has happened since? Physicists have spent those last 150 years trying to resolve the two sides. With any luck it won’t take nearly so long, but perhaps what is needed is a solution that elegantly combines tables and CSS.

By: James McGuigan

James McGuigan — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:19:47 +0000

As a profesional web coder, the biggest problem with CSS is cross-broswer compatability of some of the more useful aspects of the specs. You have to stick to the lowest common denominator, which is almost always IE. Any profesionally built site has to look perfect in IE6 and not look too bad in IE5. If IE was not the market leader, then many designers would simply say they can’t be bothered to support it and it would go the way of NS4 (which even netscape.com doesn’t support)

The result is that cool features like advanced CSS selectors cannot be used. IE only stylesheets, to correct the bits that IE is being stubborn on, can help to reduce the number of hacks and tweaks needed, both to the CSS and HTML. This all adds to the complexity that we are trying to get away from.

In an ideal world, CSS and HTML would be clean, and we could code DRY (don’t repeat yourself). The high level design could be spec’ed out with minimum need to add low level clutter to deal with broswer related rendering issues.

As a suggestion for future browsers, maybe a system to programatically (ie via javascript) extend CSS. The idea being that some CSS incompatabilities or lack of support for the latest spec, could be resolved by the developer (or standard libs would be developed fixing known issues with specific broswers). The result would be that clean HTML and CSS could be written, with the messy cross-broswer hacks being fixed in one place.

Of course if everyone had the latest broswer, and all broswers actually implemented the specs, then my suggestion wouldn’t be needed. Anyway, even if my suggestion was used, it wouldn’t get backported to older broswers, and the last people to implement it would be MS, so while we still have to support broken and unfixable broswers, the solution would be of no use.

By: pixelschrubber » Blog Archive » Ist CSS Layout immer besser?

pixelschrubber » Blog Archive » Ist CSS Layout immer besser? — Tue, 09 May 2006 11:01:30 +0000

[...] exes CSS Layout die Tabellenmonster ersetzt fragt sich Bruce Lawson und irgendwie hat er Recht. Es [...]