CSS Forum

I come from the other end.

As a newbie I started in Dreamweaver (well, after a few days getting frustrated with the other stuff out there)

I used 'layers' from the start (badly, in most cases) - but I could throw together a simple 'brochure' site much faster than using tables. Of course, most of this was in-line styles and resulted in pretty awful html - certainly not pure css

Learning about CSS was just a natural development from Dreamweaver's Layers.

With MX the support is better, and there is a free extension that pulls all the in-line styles into the head, where you can cut and paste into an external style sheet.

I usually start with DW for the basic layout, then hand tweak for the tricky bits.

Tables just seem like a difficult route to go - I use them for data thats all.

I suppose if I had persevered with tables at the start, I might be lobbing rocks at css along with the others.

"Use the tools you know"
or
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"

Ah, tables. Data (lists, rows and rows of numbers, etc) is what tables were designed for. I always love it when people say things like "my webpage is pure html/css, except for this table of numbers which is in a table."

Like others I still use tables for matrices of data. I also often use tables for data entry forms where I have a lot of text boxes, select boxes, etc. on the screen (I do alot of application development). I find tables are the best way to keeep things nicely vertically left aligned when there are a number of input controls, some of which span more than one column.

That's exactly what table are for ;) No point trying to do tabular data without tables. There's nothing wrong with tables per se, it's just another tool in your kit.

Right tool for the job and all that....

As for forms: I hear ya! Forms and CSS are tricky. But, if you stop trying to lay it out as if it has to be in a table, you can do it.

Also, using <fieldset> and <legend>'s make really attractive forms...

fortunately although beginning web design in the table layout phase, I never really like the "squareness" of them so I wasn't too heavily into them, but I do like the logic of them where (as stated above) tabular data is required.

Therefore just re-iterating Nick's View that if a table is the right tool for the job, then use one...

I like to say my newer sites are tableless, but that doesn't mean they don't have a table in them, just that the site layout doesn't use tables..

Anyway Nick what's this about <fieldset> and <legend>...tell more

For anyone else who's also learning about these tags, I found a nice page at the W3Schools website that lets you play with fieldset/legend code in the left hand side and see the results on the right. It's a pretty nice way to experiment and learn.

To add from W3Schools:

<fieldset>
The fieldset element draws a box around its containing elements.

A little style and you get useability, accessibility and great looking forms!

Just kidding. But seriously, I'm lucky to have found WW early in my learning stages. I made the switch after hearing all the rave about CSS. I had only done one site, and it was table-based. Of course that site got redone right away.

I think many people start with tables because they come from a word processing background. For someone with no design or computing background, layout concepts such as bold and italic seem perfectly natural because we've all seen them in places such as MS word. And in when creating layout elements in Word we use a table. It's the best way to get borders and lines and suchlike, and most layout type stuff in a word processed document is formatting data anyway. So turning borders on and off and lining up elements using a table seems natural at the start.

However tables give a rigid static design which looks, well like a Word document. There's a certain energy missing because everything lines up one way or another and there just isn't the control over layout that you get using positioning and such like. I think there's a certain mindshift when someone realises that building a webpage isn't the same as formatting a wordprocessing document and that the possibilities are bigger and better. This is when the usefulness of styles become obvious.

This is all based on my personal experience but it generally matches what I've seen my friends doing. I live with a computer programmer who was trained to create user interfaces and he never went through the stage of making webpages like word processor documents (and never used a table inappropriatly), whereas I know someone who took a basic HTML class and she still makes pages that look word processed.

Mindshift. Yep, you hit the proverbial nail on the head there. CSS is a mindset.

The sooner people stop trying to impose fixed 'print' ideas on a fluid medium the better.

Sheesh, I'll swear my latest client thinks that what I do anyone could (he intimated as much but I need the cash for now...) before me he had some kid doing it and he's a pretty big player in the Danish graphic desing biz....

Clients: Who'd have 'em? -- Well we'll just see how my affiliate stuff performs after the update. If I even get close to an income this jokers out! ;););)

i think i need a review of html 4.0.

Back to school for me too!