Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Why debating CSS vs Tables is pointless

So some were recently saying CSS *should not* be used for layouts and others were saying CSS *should* be used for layout.

On one end, there are people who really have better things to do than spending the day typing up angled brackets and curly braces. Great for them. Whip up a quick layout in 10 minutes and you're on your way. Requirements? What requirements?

On the other end, there are people who need to maintain sites and people who have technically challenging requirements (you know, the print versions of the pages must look a certain way, layouts look and feel are to be revised and approved by the client, etc). Great, CSS to the rescue. Money pays the bills, life is nice. Brownie points if you improved yourself by learning something new about CSS on your journey to "front-end expertise".

Most people are usually somewhere in between the two extremes and their whereabouts in the gray area also depends on things like whether it's a job or a hobby project, or whether it's monday or friday-when-omg-we-need-to-get-this-thing-out-of-the-door-now. Or whether their boss is a technical evangelist or a sales person. Or whether they're lazy. Or stressed out. Or whatever. Whether kittens are blue.

The obvious but often forgotten thing about the teh intahblagz is that we don't know who's at the other end of the wire, let alone what their environment, priorities and workflow look like. So we read all of these "advices" about why this is the bomb and why that is THE way to do whatever, and in the end, we just do whatever happens to look like the best idea at the moment. Mind fap. </acid>

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