Designers used to designing for layout tables design for layout tables.

07 Feb 2006

For the first few sites it didn’t really matter, I figured it was just getting into the swing of things. Nope.

Implementing designs that, at a glance, feel like table-based designs are probably built with that in mind. I can do all kinds of zany crap à la various things in the Zen Garden, but it doesn’t help when that [zany crap] isn’t expected. Even the One True Layout only solves so many problems… there are somethings that are easier achieved with rowspan/colspan. I’m not doing them that way, of course, but it’s just I’ve spent today agonising over how to make a not-that-complex design just work… and it’s not all falling into place as I’d like it.

Admittedly, I am trying to build it as a fluid layout, etc., etc., but… is there some level of CSS-design-wizardry at which all this suddenly becomes easy/straightforward?

Having said that, things are more exciting here not knowing entirely what’ll happen if you change a certain bunch of styles… which is where I’ve been for a year or so now. My CSS-wrangling isn’t anywhere near as bad as my JavaScript mangling, because I always have a very clear idea of what I want to achieve and how it’ll work when building styles… but getting there is forever an adventure!