CSS-based web design vs. table-based web design

a little experiment gave me pause

As I mentioned over on my Unit Circle Blog , I’m finally redesigning the Unit Circle Rekkids site. It must be at least 4-5 years since I last redid its look and I think it’s held together pretty good over that time, but it is definitely starting to look dated. I’m definitely a curmudgeon when it comes to web design on my own sites. Up until that last redesign, I avoided using tables in my sites because they didn’t always look good on Web TV or Lynx. Now for this time I’ve been thinking that it might be time to switch from a table-based design to a CSS-based one. (I was using CSS before, but in the simplest way to standardize formatting across many pages) The arguments are compelling: keeping data and presentation separate; ease of updating the look; etc… Also I’ve seen some pretty compelling sites that are done this way. I don’t have a book yet, so I’m just using Dreamweaver 8’s CSS features and using internet resources to figure it out. It isn’t too bad, but after putting together a simple design and testing it out in a few browsers I realized that the CSS implementations are different enough that trying to do this now is going to be an exercise in pain. I’m going back to my table-based layouts with maybe a bit more CSS formatting for this go-around, I think. Once the site is up, I will post my CSS and table based prototypes somewhere and link to them here.

I think that some of the CSS sites I’ve seen are a little to pretentious about it. I don’t think that CSS was originally meant to be the end-all be-all layout system for a website in the same way that tables weren’t either. People took the capabilities of these simple ideas and extended them into doing things that they were never originally meant to be used for. CSS files were supposed to be shared across groups of pages, creating more of template-like approach for similar pages. Tables were meant to help lay out tabular data. The war against table-based design seems a little unnecessary to me, especially since CSS consistency across browsers is still be pretty weak. My table based designs look awesome on IE4, how about your CSS ones? Now, I’m not arguing for table-based design here. I’m up for using whatever tools work well and make my life simpler. I’m going to be getting a CSS book or two for Chanukah maybe and I’ll see if I was just going about it wrong. What I am against is CSS proponents pretending that their use of CSS is more than hacking in the same way that tables were hacked.

anyway, once more into the breach.

The house of representatives screws the American people and then head home to gloat about it

This is so disgusting that I almost don’t know what to say

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002692294_webcongress19.html

There is so much insanity here, I don’t know where to begin. On it’s way out for the Christmas break, the house stayed up all night attaching evil amendments to important bills and cutting critical health and social programs.

I don’t even know if I can actually comment on each thing it is just leaves me speechless. I’ll just list the crap.

Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was passed after it was added to a critical defense budget bill

The GOP is crowing about cutting the deficit by $40 billion which is a drop in the bucket not only of our national debt, but even in the bucket of the yearly deficit under President Bush. In that $40 billion they are so proud about cutting:

  • Medicare cut by $6.4 billion
  • Medicaid cut by $4.8 billion
  • Student loans raised to a fixed 6.8% instead of variable lower rates saving $13 Billion

So, in this big budget savings bill, they manage not only to screw over our past (cutting aid to senior citizens), but also our future (making student loans more expensive). I just can’t find the words to express how much these people hate the people they serve.

The president is spying on us

Again, the parallels between the current administration and communist-era Russia are almost frightening

So the administration has been using the guise of the war on terror to spy on its own citizens. Is anyone surprised by this? This is exactly what everyone who was actually paying attention to the Patriot Act language said was going to happen. Americans said they’d be willing to give up some civil liberties in order to be safe. Well, now you’ve given up your liberties and you aren’t any safer. Feeling cheated yet? You should be. What is actually interesting when you get into the details, is that this spying might have even been illegal within the rubric of the wiretapping laws.

It’s time once again for me to ask for a real congressional investigation, and for the Republicans to once again decide that, as President, cheating on your wife is worth of a special prosecutor and hundreds of hours of discussion, but lying to the American people, imprisoning American citizens for months without charges, torturing foreigners, spying on the American people and basically acting more like a dictator than a representative of a Democracy is A-OK.

The crazy-ass thing is that after getting caught at it, he says he’s going to keep doing it and that disclosing it was helping the enemy. These people make me insane. Bush wants to be the national father figure, but he’s the idiot dad with a drinking problem that says way too often “do what I say, not what I do.” The enemy, the enemy, doubting the administration is supporting the enemy, questioning the administration is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Cheney says “debate is good, discussion is good” while simultaneously slamming every lawmaker who steps forward to do just that.

“It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is discussing the enemy.” – President Bush

Get this George, you work for the American people. You work for us and we’ll discuss whatever we want, whenever we want, in whatever medium or venue that we wish until you just declare yourself dictator and we get busy mobilizing against you.

hey, remember these things?

mission accomplished, my ass

The administration receiving many “F”s and “D”s from the 9-11 commission this week reminded me of a couple of other things that seem to have slipped out of the American memory banks. Hey, remember Osama Bin Laden? Remember how he was public enemy #1 after 9/11? Remember how we were going to “smoke him out of his hole”? Yeah, that never happened.

Remember how after Hurricane Katrina George Bush promised that we were going to rebuild New Orleans and the government was going to launch new initiatives to help the poor? Well, with the new rounds of tax and budget cuts, the war on Poverty has turned back into the war on the poor that had been going on since 2000.

A few predictions:
1) Congress will start withdrawing troops out of Iraq next year so that Republicans can hold on to their majority in the elections.
2) In 2008, we still will not have captured Osama Bin Laden. If we have pulled out of Iraq, it will be in full-on-civil war, or if we haven’t, we will still have our soldiers attacked daily.
3) Also in 2008, in New Orleans: The French Quarter, Garden District and downtown will be 100% back to where they were. In the poor outlying districts, away from the tourists, nothing will have changed since Katrina and the levees will still be inadequate.

Follow the bouncing ball

If you connect the dots between the various Bush Administrations failures, you can see the pattern emerge…

Hurricane Katrina showed how devastatingly out of touch and how slow to action George Bush is, right? Maybe you’ll get this realization if you’ve never seen the timeline for President Bush on 9/11. Just as Bush waited days before doing a flyby over what was left of New Orleans, he entered the classroom after the first tower had been hit. Hundreds of people had just died in a major catastrophe in a major American city (it may not have been clear that we were under attack at that point) and the President ignores this to sit down and read to children. It wasn’t until several minutes after the second tower was hit that he stood up to leave the room and only when his staff basically hauled him out. If there was ever any doubt to the lack of engagement of this president, 9/11 should have made it clear. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina just showed that the man still hadn’t learned the lesson that he should actually care about the American people instead of just using their deaths to further his own agenda.

Similarly, if you remember the flap around Armstrong Williams and the Bush administration planting false news reports and paying for favorable editorials in American media, the fact that we were doing the same in Iraq shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What surprises me these days isn’t the fact that our President continues to violate American law and the trust of the American people but that anyone is surprised about it anymore.

The disparity between George Bush and Alan Greenspan’s assessments of the economy

should make every American who voted for W feel like an idiot.

Alan Greenspan says that the economy is doing pretty good at the moment, especially considering the blows from this Hurricane season. However, he looks at the deficit, America’s aging citizens and our debt which is being shouldered by foreign countries and he says “we need to do something about this.” George Bush says that the economy is doing wonderfully and that is thanks to his plan of deficit spending and tax cuts which are producing the crazy debt. He makes no mention of the future because he doesn’t think about the future, he doesn’t give a damn about it. That is the next guys job. He is a dorkus who is condemning the American people and the American way of life to decades of ruin to pay for his excesses. If I were reasonably young (which I am), I’d be making plans to get off this sinking ship and find a place where I won’t be paying off Reagan and G.W.B.’s get rich quick schemes until I die.