Comment CSS Ease (Score 1) 499
The way I see it, widespread conversion to the type of CSS usage envisioned by CSS evangelizers won't happen until it becomes easy to do the things that people are used to doing without CSS, such as with tables. If your CSS is larger OR more complicated than the tables what have you gained?
Here's an example of how to position a block (table cell) of fixed width and height, in any of 9 relative positions within the doc, and then to have content similarly positionable. It's very easy to alter the alignments (positioning). This kind of thing can be simulated using CSS but each position requires special "hackery" and winds up being complicated to switch between (and not even considering IE here).
Now, I agree that the structure below (two levels of tables!) is far from desireable, but it's quick and it works. Now you would think that you could create a div (or something) and put its style to display:table-cell and remove at least one level of table. I'd love to see it work. This is simple basic stuff that people need - unless CSS offers it, developers will be staying in table land.
A second example I saw today. Someone had an input element (of type text) in a table cell they wanted to expand to the full width of the cell (because they had several such in the same column and this was a simple way of producing uniform width). This did not work because the margin extends past the box! IE may have gotten the box model wrong, but there were some things that were much cleaner with it. The point is that reasonable types of things should be easy to do - that's what will gain mass acceptance.
Csaba Gabor from Vienna
Here's an example of how to position a block (table cell) of fixed width and height, in any of 9 relative positions within the doc, and then to have content similarly positionable. It's very easy to alter the alignments (positioning). This kind of thing can be simulated using CSS but each position requires special "hackery" and winds up being complicated to switch between (and not even considering IE here).
Now, I agree that the structure below (two levels of tables!) is far from desireable, but it's quick and it works. Now you would think that you could create a div (or something) and put its style to display:table-cell and remove at least one level of table. I'd love to see it work. This is simple basic stuff that people need - unless CSS offers it, developers will be staying in table land.
A second example I saw today. Someone had an input element (of type text) in a table cell they wanted to expand to the full width of the cell (because they had several such in the same column and this was a simple way of producing uniform width). This did not work because the margin extends past the box! IE may have gotten the box model wrong, but there were some things that were much cleaner with it. The point is that reasonable types of things should be easy to do - that's what will gain mass acceptance.
Csaba Gabor from Vienna
<html><head><title>Table cell test</title></head>
<body style="margin:0" noscroll bgcolor=green><table
style="height:100%;width:100 %"><tr>
<td style="height:100%;width:100%" valign=bottom align=center><table>
<tr><td valign=middle align=right style="height:4in;width:5in;background:pink"
>Thi s text goes to the middle right<br>of a bottom left div<br><br>
How to do it without tables???</td>
</tr></table></td></tr></table></b ody></html>
