Hockey wrote:Do you really think CSS will replace TABLES when it comes to rendering complex interfaces/layouts???
I'd say it already has for most of the best developers.
Take a look around the
CSS zen garden, and witness *hundreds* of incredibly complex interfaces and layouts - all done without a table. Entirely using simple divs and semantic html, each style is a new stylesheet and set of images. After you've seen about half of them (I have!), you quickly understand that the best designs on the planet don't need tables, and the developers doing those designs don't use tables (for layout).
Hockey wrote:I really like tables...even though I have before encountered limitations...maybe it was a bug in IE...not sure...never checked in FF

Tables offer control, easily. They fit the "chop and drop" mentality that comes from pixel-perfect layouts in Photoshop. It is fairly straightfoward, and you can grasp the design easily.
However, they have a number of problems. They assume the content size in certain sections wont change - which generally, it does. They are extremely inflexible, and usually require the developer to use a fixed font size to prevent the table "breaking" at the seams. That results in less usability. Tables render more slowly, generally take more code to accomplish the same task, cant be cached as easily, AND have more layout issues on nextgen devices like cellphones and PDA's.
Thats quite a hit just to get "easy layout" - especially when that layout is so limited.
Hockey wrote:1) WYSIWYG editors understand them
The latest versions of WYSIWYG editors understand css just as well. Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and NVU all handle css-based layout designs just fine in their latest versions.
Hockey wrote:2) The css knowledge I do contain suggests that reading the structure of a table in HTML format makes slightly more sense than CSS equivleant???
Thats accurate, but it also means the *contents* in that table makes *less* sense than the same in a solid semantic html page. Which is better? Search Engines read content in a linear fashion - so tables lose. Worse, tables rob the structure of semantic meaning - you can't do an h1 in the middle of a table.
Hockey wrote:I'm thinking HTML just a more human readble pattern...unless I"m missing something about CSS...
You definitely are missing something there. Well done html+css is far more readable than tables - if we are talking about content and structure. If you mean the layout itself, yes, CSS can take a little while to wrap your head around it.
Hockey wrote:As CSS grows in popularity or stops where it is...do you think TABLES and CSS will always coexist???
Its important to make a clean distinction here. Tables themselves are not evil. For displaying *tabular data*, tables are the right choice. Tables for LAYOUT, however, is non-ideal. Most high-end developers left tables for layout behind years ago.