Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 2:43 pm
I'm not sure thats a fair statement. Stylesheets rarely change, and thus are cached for longer periods of time. Unlike the dynamic main (html) page, the stylesheet doesnt change each day - or each story.Gen-ik wrote: First of all the page size was reduced by about 50% (or 50K) which is good... but the actual CSS file will increase dramatically with the number of different divs on the page... so page-size reduction using Divs is really not worth mentioning because it balances itself out.
The net result is that once you've been there, you've got the stylesheet, and shouldnt have to download it again - perhaps for as much as a month. Whereas with the style information embedded in the html, you have to grab that (lets say 50k) of style information each load.. thats a substantial benefit in terms of bandwidth savings, and for clients that visit more than once (i'd say the majority of espn.com's viewers are return visitors).
True. Absolute control is either more difficult, or impossible. But thats actually part of the purpose of css - it also empowers users to be able to change font sizes, layout, and more. In mozilla, you can specify your OWN stylesheet for a site. Its amazingly helpful for people with sight difficulties.Gen-ik wrote: Next. Two other major problems with div-layouts are true vertical-alignments (which is mentioned in the interview) and also centering the entire page on-screen. Using absolute positioned divs and trying to make your page centered is impossible unless you use very heavy amounts of JS code to detect and position each div, and using non-absolute positioned divs will cause display problems on various browsers.
But that said, yes, I agree. A div-only layout makes some things hard, and others impossible.So does tag-soup.
It also makes some things possible, and some things easy, as does tag-soup.
Css Zen garden, and sites like it are making huge strides in css designs, inspiring purely css-driven layouts like three columns with header and footer..Gen-ik wrote: Like I said I am more convinced than I was, but I'm still not 100% about the whole div-no-table concept due to the number of problems for site layout it can cause. Placing a footer at the bottom of a page is another problem mentioned in the interview, especially if the content of the page is dynamic, and using a single table for this seems like the most logical way of doing it.
The original poster asked why "no tables was good" (paraphrasing).
Four reasons:
1. Tables are meant to represent tabular data, only.
2. Effective use of css deeply reduces bandwidth (see caching above)
3. Effective use of css increases semantic content - your html MEANS something.
4. Its much more effective on cellphones, next-gen devices, and easier to parse.
Notice, none of those really reject tables COMPLETELY, just emphasize that much like flash, frames, and innerHTML, there are effective ways to avoid doing things that webpages shouldnt, and good reasons to do so.
Tables still have a role - just a very small one, much smaller than some people would like (similar to the use of flash).
