Ralford.net

  [Development]

If you're familiar with CSS, you can probably stop reading this post...

Years ago, back before I knew CSS existed, I always used table tags to place elements on my webpages. They worked at the time, but as my projects became more involved, I cornered myself into a number of situtations where table tags were not sufficient for organizing the layout of a page. These days, I almost never use tables. And to be honest, CSS is easier to make a layout the way you want.

So many pages still use tables, but the truth is - tables are for tabular data. If you are still using tables to setup the layout of your webpage, you should really step back and learn about CSS.

A mentor once explained to me that an ideal webpage keeps it's content separate from the page layout. CSS allows the developer to make changes to the style and layout of a page without messing with the content. A great illustration of this concept can be found at Zen Garden, where each webpage uses the same HTML but a different style sheet. If you are new to CSS, like all of us once were, I suggest you give it a try. Below are some resources to get you started:

• Cacading Style Sheets - A webpage at W3.org listing some CSS tools and some browsers that support CSS
• CSS Edge - Eric Meyer explains some handy CSS tricks
• CSS Tooltips - An example showing how to make hovering text boxes with CSS and span tags
• W3C CSS Validator - Does your style sheet conform to the W3C recommendations?
• Zen Garden - Where each page has the same HTML, but a different style sheet

Comments (0)      Post a Comment