Having spent the last 12 months beingtold again and again that I should get up to speed with web site design using CSS layout not tables I spent an evening this week checking it all out. I discovered after all this time that it is nothing more than a revamp of the old layers which I was using years ago buts topped using because they were inherantly difficult for some browsers and screen readers to use. Tables were sturdier and less trouble prone. Ok I realise that this new revamp is probably much better but it was such a shock to discover that all this fuss was being made of something that is not really that new.

Can someone please explain why they think that designing using these new layers is so much better?

Thanks

Originally Posted by tonya

Having spent the last 12 months being told again and again that I should get up to speed with web site design using CSS layout not tables I spent an evening this week checking it all out. I discovered after all this time that it is nothing more than a revamp of the old layers which I was using years ago buts topped using because they were inherantly difficult for some browsers and screen readers to use.

Tables were sturdier and less trouble prone. Ok I realise that this new revamp is probably much better but it was such a shock to discover that all this fuss was being made of something that is not really that new.

Can someone please explain why they think that designing using these new layers is so much better?

Thanks

Maybe this will explain, I was given this a while back and I thought the same until I started using <div id=""></div> and <span id=""></span> and only use a handful of tables when required. I'm not a great fan of layers because it's too fussy and using the above is much better and loading time is faster.

Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered

Ok now I am confused.
What you have said is exactly what I discovered. You use div and id reference your CSS style. The only difference between this and layers is they used to be called layers but Dreamweaver always created them using div tags I have checked some of my old files. So is it just that Dreamweaver has always done it that way & its fortunate for me I use Dreamweaver. Because when I saved and opened WEB pages proclaiming to use the new technique in dreamweaver my god they look just like layers & even move about like them etc.
Its actually kind of good news for me. There I was thinking I had to spend time learning something new and I actually knew how to do it all along.

Stubbornly still prefer tables & I guess thats habit. Until I am convinced going back to using these layer type things revamped si really a great idea I won't eb converting any of my sites just yet. Speed is not a big problem on them anyway so I can rest easy and instead of burning the midnight oil at the PC I can curl up in bed with a good book !! Yahooo !!!! Robin Hobbs latest trilogy here I come !

I'm pretty dure Dreamweaver refers to DIV tags as 'layers', not toally sure why. A DIV tag with no CSS styling is simply a DIVision of (x)HTML, and just used to divide up content. Style a DIV tag with CSS, and you can create layouts with them.

In the past, browser support for CSS has been pretty diabolical, so the trend was to use tables to layout bits on the page. It's always worked, but it's never been perfect and it was never what tables were meant for - table based layouts are the biggest hack in web design.

Now CSS support in browsers is a lot better (still not perfect, every browser has it's pitfalls and even some of the 'standards' are not very well worded) designers are starting to use CSS to it's full potential and only use tables for what they're meant for, tabular data. You mentioned screen readers in your OP - CSS based layouts can be better for screen readers because the screen readers read the content of the page and ignore the CSS. You can, for example, put the main content of the page at the top of the HTML document and the navigation under it, then use CSS to put the navigation graphicly on top of the page. That way a user with a screen reader won't have to skip over the navigation to the content but you still get the visual benifit of having the navigation at the top. You can't do that with tables.

At the end of the day, DIVs and CSS are not a very new technology, what's new is that browser support for it has improved a lot recently.

Yep basically what Minaki said. Not necessarily all new, but browsers have better support. A few tweaks and here sometimes, but really not many at all.

I think css layouts have a lot of advantages over table layouts, though I think often those advantages don't sound as great as they are until you actually make the switch. Being able to separate your presentation and structure alone would be enough for me. When done right it leaves for much cleaner and more readable code everywhere. Code that is also lighter and much more maintainable.

I've recently converted a site from a table based layout to a CSS based layout. It's amazing how much code has been saved, the file sizes have been reduced hugely, and the pages load a lot faster.

It's amazing sometimes isn't it. I've had clients approach me to make a few changes on theire sites that have tables and <font> tags and all the rest. I always start converting the site to css even if they don't ask. Mostly just chaning the html attributes to css at first and cleaning things up little by little. The next time I need to make an update it's so much faster.

I read awhile back that when espn started using css they saved something like 50% (I'm guessing a little at the %) of the bandwidth they had been using. It's still a pretty slow loading site to me, but that's a considerable savings.

Just like everyone else says:

Its hard to understand why CSS is so much 'easier' .. but once you get the hang of it and get familar with CSS, you look back at designing a website in tables and you soon realize how much HARDER it would be to use tables versus CSS based.

Hope you make the switch!!! Come join us