Hi,

I am about to make a leap of faith by changing my site from tables to all CSS controlled. What version of browsers will no longer be able to see my site? Will they be able to see it but in a degraded format? How will it look in a non compatable browser?

I have well in excess of 90% of clients on XP so I think they will be safe. It is the older stuff I am worried about.

Any pointers in this direction would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Simon

http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/browser_support/

take a peek there.

Wow...that make me really nervous. Does anybody have any real life experiences that they would like to share? Does anybody run a business su=ite that uses CSS as opposed to tables. How has it worked out for you. Can I see your site?

Thanks again for the help.

Simon

Very few people tend to use non-compliant browsers these days.

If they do then they really do need to get with the 21st century.

However if CSS layout only is done badly then IE can be quite a bit slower at rendering it as opposed to tables.

Personally I still don't favour the CSS approach over tables but I've done a few sites in CSS layouts anyway.

Originally posted by Rich2k
Very few people tend to use non-compliant browsers these days.

If they do then they really do need to get with the 21st century.

However if CSS layout only is done badly then IE can be quite a bit slower at rendering it as opposed to tables.

Personally I still don't favour the CSS approach over tables but I've done a few sites in CSS layouts anyway.


I am still confused. If you look at the link :

http://www.westciv.com/style_master...rowser_support/

it is plain to see that NONE of the browsers are compatable :-(

Also...why do you prefere tables over CSS. And...how can someone do CSS badly? It is just a list of instructions in a text file ...or so I thought.

Thanks again.

Simon

Hello!

Regarding CSS I have some experience, some rather unpleasant experience.

I noticed someone posted he had 90% on XP. Well that's ok, but who's visiting there sites?!? Them-selves or some totally different people? Africa based buyer with a 386 machine?

Well, with older browsers, you could even get a completely blank page. That's what I got with some of my sites on Netscape's 4.7, which is quite old, but still not that old.

Only with the newest browsers you can hope to get slightly different results from what you were hoping. O 7, N 7, E 6 and probably any later M, the god of all.

Nevertheless CSS is the quickest way to alter styles and give a site a completely new feeling in just minutes.

If you have an hour or two to take up CSS, you will later save months.

Good luck!

Airnine

You can achieve the same thing by properly templating your site though.

Run your site through XSLT and all you have to do is edit a single file and your entire site layout changes immediately... and much easier than editing CSS as you can't change your ENTIRE layout with CSS alone (as you might want to move from two to three column layouts for example)

I like table layouts over CSS because it's often easier to predict their outcome on browsers. It does also depend on your audience. I HAVE to cater for NS4 level browsers to some degree i.e. it must resemble the layout of the full site.

Originally posted by Rich2k
and much easier than editing CSS as you can't change your ENTIRE layout with CSS alone (as you might want to move from two to three column layouts for example)

The amount of a site that you can modify with the CSS alone is pretty amazing. Take a look at the examples here:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

zen garden site is fantastic!

Originally posted by Rich2k

Run your site through XSLT and all you have to do is edit a single file and your entire site layout changes immediately... and much easier than editing CSS as you can't change your ENTIRE layout with CSS alone (as you might want to move from two to three column layouts for example)


Have a look at www.iht.com

Their site uses CSS for layout, and you can easily switch the number of columns for your text. It is possible, and it works.

CSS layouts have a few benefits :

They degrade nicely. NN 4.x has problems with deeply nested tables (which are required for complex layouts), and it will not display properly. With CSS (which you can control) -- you can ensure that the content is accessible -- which is, lest we forget, what the web is all about. Content. Not layouts, or flashy animations, content.

Some browsers, that don't deal with tables nicely -- will still show CSS formatted content. You can only guess what will happen with table-based content.

CSS allows you to have different stylesheets for different media types. For example, with css (without any additional coding) you can specifiy stylesheets for the printer, for the screen, for a screen reader, etc. Such things are not possible with table-based layouts.

And, on a more philosophical note -- tables are not meant for layout. They are meant to display tabular data -- which means things like calendars, reports, etc. If you care about using proper markup, then this is of concern to you. For the other 99% of the people that design for the web, they could care less.

I know the benefits and pitfalls of CSS. I've been a professional web designer since 96. I just don't feel that there is an one killer reason why I shouldn't use layout tables.

Tables may not have been designed for layout, but they are used for layout... live with it. It also does NOT break WAI accessibility guidelines to use layout tables so long as they downgrade gracefully (which they usually do if you don't use colspan and rowspan)