So lately I was working on quite a bunch of designs using a lot of really advance coding techniques, from advanced CSS to DHTML, XHTML, unobstrusive Javascript, a little AJAX, you name it. Basically, what most people calls Web2.0 (in an erroneous way). Anyway, seems like the "new thing" is tableless design, and therefore I've made quite a bunch of tableless designs. As a matter of fact, I can say I'm doing magic with CSS, tableless and even pseudo-image CSS (I mean replacing a lot of instances where images are used with plain code)
However... I came to the conclusion tableless is really cool... for non adult and/or corporate. And quite unusable when it comes to tours, esp reality tours. And I'll tell you why:
1- most end users (my customers) can't replace the tours' episodes or make changes unless I do it for them.
2- Tables are parsed equally by any browser (more or less, but in a 99%). Tableless design requires different sets of CSS for different browsers, and the most complex you go, the more sets and hacks you need to apply, esp when it comes to that crappy piece of shit known as Internet Exploiter which happens to be the most used browser
3- Due to 2- the code growths exponentially, making one of the advantages disappear (I'm talking about page size) and still having you wonder whether your design will look as expected in every broswer
Now, when we're talking about long style tours, corporate and such, the advantages of tableless and advanced CSS are awesome, all the control you can have with this makes it really worthy.
I saw somebody asking for tableless galleries a couple weeks ago, wsa wondering why since I can't see any real advantage for galleries or reality style tours or anything else that requires further modifications, unless you're code wise, of course.
So, in short, my proposed combo would be:
- corporate, long style tours, blogs, FPA and stuff: tableless
- reality style, galleries, designs with updated content: tables + CSS (even thru some PHP controlling)
what do you think from and end user and a designer/coder approach?
Discuss