[ale] OT: Can MS IE Really Be This Broken?

[George Carless]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 10:18:09AM -0400, Nathan J. Underwood wrote:
> I definitely understand the fondness of CSS, and prefer them myself. 
> But, believe it or not, there are good reasons to use tables rather than 
> CSS sometimes.  For example, if you're outputting HTML and you want it 
> to look nice.  It's really easy to stick a <table> just before a loop, 
> have the loop spit out <tr><td> (repeat for each column), at the end, 
> spit out a </tr>, and then, close the whole thing up with a </table> 
> tag.  If you've got 1 row returned or 10000, you can (usually) be sure 
> that it will be formatted as expected.  Quick, simple, and effective. 
> Much like deciding to use a 'manual' screwdriver instead of a power 
> screwdriver.  Sometimes, the old, tried and true, 'manual' screwdriver 
> is just better suited for the job.

Well, I develop web sites for a living, and I'd say "it depends".  If 
you need a loop where you have columns in the manner that you described 
then, well, the implication would be that you are dealing with tabular 
data.  And if you're dealing with tabular data then, yes, obviously a 
table is the right tool for the job.  I don't think anyone has any 
problem with that: no CSS advocate is saying tables should never be 
used.  The question is whether they should be used for generic 
placement and layout.  And in that area, the consensus is that they 
should not.  And it's as easy to create code that outputs divs as it is 
to create code that outputs table rows... I do it every day.

Here're a couple of css/xhtml-driven sites I work on: 
http://www.beyond.org.uk and http://www.manh.com/ .. I don't claim 
either is perfect, but I think they demonstrate that you don't need to 
resort to tables in order to get well-ordered web sites that look okay 
in different browsers (although, due to the nature of the beast, both 
are more tested in IE right now...)

--George