Simon Willison’s Weblog

Slow professional suicide

23rd February 2003

Al Sparber makes perfect sense in article from June last year:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using tables to layout a web page. They are great for rapidly deployment sites for clients who need to support a wide range of older browsers, or in any site that needs to display organized tabular data. Tables are not evil. But in terms of web page design, nothing is absolute. The target is constantly moving... but not in circles. To only use tables is as wrong a decision as to never use tables. Not to embrace CSS, could be tantamount to a slow professional suicide.

Web design is like medicine. Successful doctors are the ones who keep up with the latest techniques. You wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who doesn’t know the latest imaging and non-invasive surgical methods. I wouldn’t hire a web designer who couldn’t wax poetic about CSS, W3C Standards, Accessibility, and Usability.

Al has just started a very promising tutorial series on CSS Layouts: Woven with CSS: Quick Draw MacFly.