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Comment by Jasber | Hacker News Reader

The people preaching 100% CSS design are purist, they're people that love design and love CSS. These are the Eric Meyers, Doug Bowman and David Shea's of the world.

The way you see beauty in "perfect" code, they see in pure designs.

But there are benefits to their methods. Usability, accessibility, SEO, increased caching and reduced page load times are all side-effects of "pure" CSS designs.

I'd suggest taking the 80/20 approach to CSS. Take the best of what works and then just get it done and move on.

Also, my time limit for CSS problems is 1 hour. After that I use the best solution instead of the perfect one.

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The way you see beauty in "perfect" code, they see in pure designs.

While I don't know these individuals, I find that most CSS advocates favor purity in the sense of obeying the rules, not purity in the design sense.

Agree completely. The author is getting dangerously close to hypocritical by berating CSSers in the way he hates being berated by them.

For me, (mostly) pure CSS is always faster in the long run, but I would never tell another person how to build their site. I usually, however, get pretty cranky if I have to make any layout changes to sites with nested tables that someone else built. But that's my problem, not theirs.

I think the problem is that doing good frontend is a skill like any other programming skill. If you don't practice you aren't as skilled.

I get sick of people complaining about doing thing right being too hard. You wouldn't say someone taking the time to use a relational database is wasted if it meant they didn't try to serve web sites from CSV files.

Everyone sees different aspects of quality, and some of us have spent our time learning how to navigate the inconsistent waters of browser implementation to find the benefits than can be had. If that makes me a CSS troll, then I can live with it, warts and all.

What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't?

If anything, CSS would be worse as its difficult to render the same across all the different browsers and platforms. With fixed width tables, you can pretty much guarantee your results.

I'm not advocating either and tend to try to use as much CSS as possible but sometimes you spend twice as long to achieve an inferior result. After many years of working with HTML, I think most people find that happy medium.

In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed. Or that renders as columns for a sighted user but is read aloud in the correct order for a blind user.

In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.

It doesn't, not even in theory.

CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.)

The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us.

An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one.

Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text.

Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.

I'm not sure pure CSS designs offer much in terms of usability and accessibility directly. It does help mobile devices, but I think that's still too small for many sites to matter. Plus with more devices that have full browsers, this will become less important.

But another side-effect of many CSS purists is also being an HTML purist. This leads to good semantic practices all-around.

Things like properly annotating title/alt properties. Or attaching checkbox fields to labels. Making sure the tabindex is in an order that makes sense.

As you said, with practice, everyone learns the benefits of each style and develops their own personal medium.

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

What does "pure CSS" page offer in terms of usability and accessibility that a mixed-use table/css page wouldn't?

View you page using a screen reader, then ask that question again. There are valid reasons not to use CSS, but accessibility is a clear win against tables, hands down.

Since, in my opinion, the users of a website determine it's success; most of the things you mention seem irrelevant or otherwise disputable. Do you have any proof to back up your claims that DIV based pages are better indexed by search engines or increasingly cashed as compared to table based layouts?

And usability and accessibility, come on! How is a DIV based page more accessible (what do you mean by this anyway?) or more usable then a tabled layout from the users point of view?

I agree that users don't care how your site's markup looks like, but there's a second important factor when it comes to finances: developer time.

Maintaining table based layouts for sufficiently complex sites can be quite a time drain. In that sense, I agree with gigawatt that CSS is much easier to deal with.

Thank you, I couldn't have said it better myself.

The author seems to think it's either all tables, or no tables. From one extreme to another.

I prefer not to use tables for layout, but I will if I have to. :-)

The author seems to think it's either all tables, or no tables.

I don't think he is saying that at all.

Nope, doesn't sounds like the tone of the article to me. It seems he merely states it makes no sense to rigidly hang on to "being one of the cool guys" and spend hours, if not days, getting your layout done using only DIVs.

A great summary, Jasber. And with far less profanity than mine ;)

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