When I built Coastsider, my goal was to make the design, and the underlying markup, as simple as possible. I wanted to do the layout with CSS only — no tables.
Tables brought back too many memories for me of the original News.com site, which was a twisted mass of nested tables designed to over-determine how the site looked on the reader’s computer.
Right before releasing Coastsider, I decided I was unable to assure the site would look right without a basic three-column table layout. I held my nose and added the table. But at least I wasn’t nesting my table.s
Today, I came across an intractable problem that forced me to nest a second table inside my layout. I’m sure the problem is that I don’t know CSS well enough to fix this without nested tables. But I’m out of ideas and out of time. Nested tables beat the alternative, which looks awful.
Two things you might find interesting…
a) http://www.quirksmode.com/ — extensive notation on CSS, DHTML, and compatibility issues
b) http://www.drupal.org/ — nice framework for community sites with a clean codebase.
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b
oops: it’s quirksmode.org — not com
Thanks for the suggestions. I noted Drupal in my Top 10 CMS’s article.
Quirksmode is remarkable. If I were a full-time producer/designer, that would be very useful. But I’m also managing, editing, and writing Coastsider — in my spare time — and I’m not able to go into that level of detail. I’m going to have to live with the knowledge that my markup is not as elegant as I’d like it to be.
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
That’s why I’m focusing on building the content of my site and I’ve stopped dicking around with the markup.