Ok... I'm a little confused.

Last year I tried to set up a website (3 column w/ header and footer) and couldn't get it, it didn't matter what I did, it wasn't compatible with all browsers. Either the height of the columns weren't equal or the alignment of the div's or something. It would work in one or two of the browsers but once you went into opera and mac and more, there was always a problem with one.

I am a little confused to know why everyone says that CSS is soo much better, but everyone here seems to be having the same problems that I was having last year.

I am now re-doing my site in CSS but I'm starting to wonder again after seeing all these posts about alignment problems and column heights.

Why is CSS so much better if there are soo many compatibiliy options??

There are some compatibilty issues, but not as many as it seems at first. It's usually just a matter of experience. There are plenty of compatibilty issues when it comes to using tables to layout a site.

What I find is if I code to standards and get things working right in Firefox first it's a lot easier. Usually if it works in Firefox it works right away in Opera. Not always, but most of the time. Then there's just a little tweaking for IE and for a Mac.

Much of the problem is simply lack of experience and understanding. I think far too often people just fix something so it works wthout taking the time to understand why it worked or didn't at first.

Sure it's going to take time to learn to do things a new way, but it really is worth it. The separation of presentation and structure alone is enough to make it worthwhile, but you also get faster loading sites, more control over your presentation, possible seo benefits (I'm not entirely convinced yet) and many other reasons that I'll leave for whoever chimes in after me.

Those tables too have quite a few compatibilty issues. With css a lot of the issues have less to do with the language than the skill of the person using it. After spending a few years with css the time spent tweaking the code for a specific browser is very minimal. But even when I do encounter something that takes awhile to figure out I just embrace it as a challenge and once having understood what and why it's just another piece of info for the toolbox. The next time I encounter the same it's a couple more seconds to fix.

. . . but you also get faster loading sites . . .

I find that a lot of css pages tend to load slower. A lot of time people are talking about using images as a background for a DIV tag. Wouldn't that stuff slow it down??

My major reason for preferring CSS and DIVs relates to positioning. With tables, I'm forced to code left-to-right, top-to-bottom. With CSS and DIVs, I can put my code in any order I want. That means if I want to, I can put the content layer first (which I usually do), the menu first, whatever I want.

The other major angle is that design elements (fonts, layout) and content elements can be separated.

Those are the short points.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

My major reason for preferring CSS and DIVs relates to positioning. With tables, I'm forced to code left-to-right, top-to-bottom. With CSS and DIVs, I can put my code in any order I want. That means if I want to, I can put the content layer first (which I usually do), the menu first, whatever I want.

The other major angle is that design elements (fonts, layout) and content elements can be separated.

Those are the short points.

How do you put your content first, and still have it appear properly. Are you using absolute positioning??

Yes, but not on the content layer itself.

The problem is that it would be unethical of me to show you the answer without blatantly self-promoting.

Well it's not blatantly self promoting if I post the link. I'm assuming you're referring to Search Engine Friendly Layouts - SEO Standards-Compliant Layouts that's in your sig. If I'm wrong feel free to post your blatantly self promoting link. I promise not to delete it.

You can display your page elements in a different order than you have things structured in the html when using css. So I could have all my content come first or pretty near first in the html and then use css to tell that block of code to display somewhere other than first.

Even without being able to have your content come first css can produce much lighter code. I know search spiders will make it fine through a well coded table, but I prefer to have as little as I can in there to trip them up. It might not have anything to do with the css alone, but it's all I use for layouts and I've never had a problem getting the pages of a site indexed.

You're right that background images are just as slow to load as any other image. Usually though with css you end up using less images than you would with tables. Though just because something is done with css doesn't automatically make it fast or better. The person doing the coding has a lot to do with it.

I think some of what you see is table coders who are moving to css yet still holding on to many of their table ways.

Another thing with using a css layout is being able to make changes to the layout faster and easier. Let's say you create a 3 column layout with a menu in the left column, content in the center, and some news items on the right. later you decide it will work better to have the news items on the left and the menu on the right. Let's also say the site has grown to 100 pages.

You're not going to have a lot of fun recoding every page of the site to switch the two columns and I can almost guarantee you're going to get quite a few pages wrong the first time. If that same site was coded using a css layout you edit one file and the two columns are likely switched. Depend a little on how everything was coded, but if you did it right it could take all of 5 mnutes to make that kind of change. With css you at least can do something like that whereas with tables you can't.

ADAM, I'll checkout those layouts.

Vangogh, can you check out http://www.webmaster-talk.com/css-fo...r-problem.html and let me know if you see any coding there that might cause a problem?