Study:44% of US Net users post content

although my knowledge of CSS is at best cursory I am a "regular" at css garden - (ahem - ever since someone first posted the link here:D )

there are some nice sites there but still - they just seem....a "novelty" somehow... not really really serious...I don't know if I'm making myself understood - this may be one of those cultural related misunderstandings.... I'm not finding the right comparisons or something...

CSS is a great feature... but it's just a "feature" - not the "fundament" upon which you build your site - at least in my eyes. And I'm ambivalent about the wow factor - I kinda like it - since I'm not very technical myself and I started out with graphics rather than coding... but I equally appreciate ease of use and simple, clear and organized things....

I guess beauty truly lies in the eyes of the beerholder.... it's a matter of taste - and moment in time... sometines I lean towards one - sometimes towards the other....could you see something like amazon or even apple.com relying solely on CSS though?...

Absolutely. I see absolutely no reason why any site can't be redone in CSS. Take for example, www.sprintpcs.com www.wired.com www.espn.com www.cingular.com www.aol.com all CSS. I've never heard anyone that only thinks of it as a "feature". Of course it is the foundation of your site. Well actually the HTML and markup is the foundation, and CSS controls all of the appearance. I'm really having a hard time understanding why you think tables are somehow more flexible and result in better web sites somehow.

A lot of people criticize CSS layouts for being "Boxy". But table layouts are nothing but boxes. It's just that the designers have learned to work around that limitation. And they can with CSS as well.

Take this resizable box for example: http://www.vertexwerks.com/tests/sidebox/

It's all CSS using only a couple of divs and some heading an p tags for markup. If your browser is up to it, you see a beatiful rounded corner box with a drop shadow. If your browser doesn't support it, you get a heading and some paragraph tags. I just don't see how that is any less flexible than a table layout, and in my own opinion CSS is tons more flexible than tables ever dreamed of. The problem is that you are just used to Tables. If you really think about it it's a totally ridiculous way to lay out a page. But because that's all you've known, it just seems easier to you. If you really spent some time trying to do some CSS layouts you might understand how much easier it is to work with.

I am with your Deker, CSS is the way to move design towards, also the style is slick and lean. But.... having branched beyond my little ol' box next to the window in my solarium, I have been working with this web designer who is stuck in '98. He uses Frontpage to design and designs everything "graphically". I think this person is quite a "normal" web developer out there. I think a lot of people are just like him. I built a site for him and used mostly divs and a lot of the foo foo was css styles. I tried my hardest to convince him this was a good idea, but we ran into some maor problems: It was very inconsistent in Nets4.7, Nets6, Nets7 and Frontpage 2003 does not display divs well from a wysiwyg perspective. So to him it was like pointless. He saw no reason to design like that if he had no idea of what to edit and he was way too busy to learn new technologies. So I ended up converting a lot back to tables and only keeping what would display correctly in those lame browsers. But he is the boss and he decides. But my point is I think he is the norm. Most mom and pop developers use some kind of graphic tool like Frontpage and don't care what the code is like as long as they can crank out lame sites and charge a few hundred for local businesses.

Yes that's a major problem in the industry... Someone reads a dummies book on Frontpage that came with their cracked version of MS Office and they think they are web designers. And the really bad thing is that people believe them, then pay them to do their web site! And it's difficult to explain to a client what the difference is, without actually redesigning their site, and showing them the difference when they get on search engines faster and more thoroughly, which means more traffic and more money. It would be nice if there was a site written to explain these benefits to the business owners in terms they understand with examples show in increased revenues. But I know of no such place.

damn that espn site got to me - It's nice!

could mental arthritis have gotten to me already? Pretty soon I'll start mumbling stuff like "damn youngsters...eh heh I rememebr back in the day....why I aughta'...." lol - fun aside - maybe it's time I looked into this "future stuff" seriously - else I'll be run over by toddlers

I stand corrected - there are serious sites CSS driven ...yeah. but the vertex box may have been the wrong example to convince me. It has a bug on my Opera browser - they mention it - the one pixel lag...and it shows when the window is maximnized...

haha - never thought of myself as a "mom and pop developer" hihi but it's funny. Deker if you write that explanatory site - I'm in - lemme know where to sign up. Time to rejuvenate the ol' thinking box

Coding with CSS only is alot easier and more versatile, granted.
However, I haven't bumped into one client that has used an up-to-date browser, not to mention anything else than IE. I don't know how many times I've had to add font-tags and change the CSS attributes for some tables into the old "<td width='100'>" stuff because they've called me and said it looks like crap on their home computers. What am I to say?

"Hey sure, 99% of your clients will see it like that, but give it -- say ten years -- and it'll be super!" ? That's not something I can do if I want to keep earning money. People run netscape 4.7's, they run even older browsers, they do NOT run mozilla or Opera. I'd love to drop the table-based HTML coding, but how can I? How can you? When can anyone do that without getting those phonecalls about sites not working on their 1994-made browser?

It's true you can't always do a full CSS layout in "the real world". But you can at least do the layout in a simple table, and use CSS for controling fonts, spacing, margins, colors, etc. Even NS 4.7 understands most of that stuff.