09 January 2002

When Standards Are Not

I've spent the last few evenings working on the layout for the new weblog.

For what I want to do, a nice three-column text layout (not unlike a newspaper) is perfect.

Unfortunately, after spending lots of time putting together a couple of potential three-column layouts utilizing CSS2 (no tables), I found out that even recent browsers vary greatly in their (mis)implementation of the CSS2 box model. The layout I liked best was beautiful in IE 5, 5.5, 6, Opera 5+, NS 6.2, and Mozilla 0.9.6 (all windows) -- except when hitting reload in Mozilla, which caused everything to break loose. The second layout had problems in IE 5.5.

Now, I'm familiar with the CSS2 hacks and such discussed at Glish, and Blue Robot and Climb to the Stars and elsewhere. But the point of web standards is to AVOID ridiculous hacks. Unfortunately, I could not come up with non-hack workarounds for the problems I was having.

Save for one. Yep, retreating to the old HTML table layout. It's an easy way to do a 3-column layout, and works (more or less) in all browsers. So that's what I will have to wind up doing. Even though I hate it, because tables should be for tabular DATA, not for layout.

But I will keep the tables clean (for non-graphical browsers) and otherwise free of formatting clutter, which will be done with a stylesheet (where formatting belongs).

But I'm still not pleased with that solution.

[Posted @ 09:40 PM CST]