Tables are for eating, not for HTML

Posted in Rants,technology,Things I hate — by Don on 09/10/07

Been refreshing the skills a bit. You know, looking at bad pages, trying to figure out how to make ‘em not quite so bad.

It’s amazing that today, in the year 2007, in the 21st century, in the age of browsers that, for the most part, completely understand CSS, that there are still websites using tables for layout.

Listen up you that think you are layout artists or call yourselves designers. Because you have a copy of Dreamweaver DOES NOT mean you can make webpages, k? Save that stuff for the company intranet or your family photos.

Knuckle down, click over to Amazon or where ever, get a copy of HTML for Dummies and whatever you can find that has the terms ‘CSS’ and ‘bible’ in them and start reading/practicing.

Yes, use notepad. Move to homesite or smultron or whatever later. For now, you need to learn the basics. Another good place would be to tear apart a layout of a blog. Almost all CSS there anymore. The whole table-within-a-table-within-a-table is so 1997. Let it go. Nested tables are nasty and tables should only be used for tabular data. Of course, I use CSS for that too, but that’s how I roll.

And stop with the Dreamweaver already. You are making too much work for me when I have to go back to fix your busted pages.