Comments on: Three-column CSS success (and a challenge)

By: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:17:52 +0000

Well now this makes me feel so much better, here I thought it was me who didn’t know his way around code to save his life (which is still true by the way) and I find all these people who are coders who can’t do just what I’ve been swearing about for the last three days.

Thankfully I’ve not been using my real index page, but knowing what a pain I’ve had in the past with MT and CSS I made a test pilot – just a mess. I will now go learn how to use tables

thank you for making me feel a lot better about myself.

Richard

By: Ron Evans

Ron Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:06:29 +0000

Oh my goodness, keep it down… You don’t want the code weenies to hear you…

Why such wholesale loathing of tables and yet where is the hatred of bu||$h!+ CSS hacks?

They want to kill this innocent man named Spacer Gif and yet they casually toss out IE5 box model hacks and shameless NN4 workarounds.

In the words of the famous web coder/designer Rodney King… “Can’t we all just get along?”

I agree 1000% with the post of Julian bond and some of the others (thanks for having the guts to say it…) CSS can’t even build a 3 column layout…that’s only the backbone of western information architecture dating back to I dunno the guttenberg bible!

Also since we should only use tables for tabular data and since they were never meant for design, lets apply that thinking to everything else:

1. Don’t use highways, (originally built for the military)

2. Gunpowder: (Made by the chinese for fireworks)

3. The Internet itselt (Government, Scientistists Math and University people)

4. Sex (A means of procreating the species, enjoyment is just a side benefit, now we should use CSS for that instead)

5. Jeeps & SUV’s (A military vehicle not built for our current use.)

6. Recycled tires and plastic jugs (Destroy all those bird feeders, repaved roads, sneaker soles, oil nameless other things — tires and plastic jugs weren’t meant to be used for other things.)

Seriously: Please let me know of any links to web/code where people use as much CSS as possible but can leave their ivory towers every so often to code with a table if necessary.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 01:18:22 +0000

The emperor has no clothes. It’s a simple as that.

At a company I worked for a new hire bullied the manager into forbidding tables. “Use web standards. Real web designers never use tables.” So I wrote a PERL script to fetch the home page of the 100 most popular sites on the web, virtually all of which use tables for layout–usually quite a few. Where do real web designers work? Apparently not at Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Flickr, the BBC, CNN, Amazon, eBay and on and on…

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 08:58:48 +0000

David,
The nasty secret is out. I long ago came to the conclusion that CSS was designed by computer scientists, not by designers. This is why it handles inheritance perfectly, but can’t handle a 3 column layout.

While you were selling Interleaf, I was a typesetter making books, magazines and glossy brochures and company reports, but I am now the non-proud owner of several websites with CSS 3 column layouts that fundamentally don’t work at some level.

Ugh

By: Ian Jindal

Ian Jindal — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:39:27 +0000

Hi - saw this post and sympathised: I'm waiting for someone to do an MT template and just use that. For someone who's willing to cut their own code, check out this "floatorial" that I was emailed today from Carson Systems - fits the bill apart from the all-browser bit. http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/tutorial0915.htm

By: julian bond

julian bond — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:00:44 +0000

You’ve just discovered the dirty little secret. CSS is broken. And the biggest break is that it can’t cope with what must be the single most common overall page layout. I’ve tried and tried and tried to do the same thing you have and also given up.

By all means use CSS and try and avoid using tables when CSS works. But it’s pretty much impossible to do the gross layout of a 3 column website without one big table to handle it. float, mixes of relative and absolute positioning and fake negative margins just don’t cut it.

So what are the chances of CSS3 including gross layout controls that actually work for web designers?

By: Charlie Green

Charlie Green — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 03:22:02 +0000

I isn’t my place to say “I told you so” (Damn! Did I type that? And my “backspace” button is inop! Ignore the previous phrase.) but I work with (Not design; I let the gurus with no personal life handle that.) and maintain (OK, I do use CSS but find HTML more universal and quite adequate. And NO WYSIWYG editors.) several websites. Virtually (No pun intended.) all of them are in three column format. None of them do it with CSS.

Why? Because, as you discovered, you can’t make it universally displayable in all browsers. The W3C tends to force all browser software designers to treat HTML the same. Who’s makin’ ‘em treat CSS the same?

Sometimes Big Brother helps. Just like the lids on peanut butter jars: blue is chunky and red is creamy. Or diesel nozzles are all green. Someone made these things happen.

OTOH, tarps are all colors. And tires are all black. And screwdrivers are a rainbow of colors with no ryhme or reason; the least “they” could do is make some color code for right and left handed screwdrivers! Why can’t some organization of manufacturers (or whoever) sit down and standardize all these things? Color code them for size and function or chaos will continue to reign.

Old Bogus, the Colorado Curmudgeon

By: orcmid

orcmid — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:40:59 +0000

Wonderful. I love the improved use of real-estate and the flexibility I have by controlling the width of my browser window. This is very nice. Thanks for the smaller margins on the sides.

I’m still not able to dial the font sizes up and down in the content (though it works on the top banner). I think this has to be with absolute sizes being specified in the HTML. I’ll take a look at that later.

I would use this scheme with my blog for sure. Thanks for the effort. Yes, tables have their use.

By: Chris Hanson

Chris Hanson — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:02:51 +0000

I've spent many hours trying to do exactly this for my own site. More power to you if you can get it to work!

By: Tim Porter

Tim Porter — Wed, 31 May 2006 16:46:09 +0000

Allow me to contribute to whomever gets this right for you — and then use the code, too. I, too, have surrendered in the CSS three-column wars, trying for hours to build a 3-column layout in Movable Type.

Actually, I’ve achieved a form of inner piece in accepting my web skills have plateaued with tables!