Tableless css design has popped into the webdesign world. The practice of avoiding tables to encode content display had become extremely popular and to a certain extent challenged most webdesign people around the world.

What is it ? Short, CSS is a coded sistem of instructions for displaying content of the webpages. Best practice includes putting all your design code in a single or multiple CSS files. A CSS file stands for "Cascading style sheet" and is loaded by the browser before content is displayed. Thiss means you load classes and style definitions to a browser once, and html code then calls the values for different style priperties of the content.

Whats wrong with tables?

Nothing! As long as you use them for displaying tabular data. Or is it? The nearly fataly absolute need to use CSS for all and any syle coding came out from the confusion of the "new platform compatibility" era. Cell phones, PDA and other handheld devices had shown trouble displaying "content rich websites". At the beginning with the display sizes topping at 480*480px and no flexible display mechanisms the problem appeared to be :tables.

"This website is huge, all of content may not be displayed" was the panic causing statment on many of webauthor`s celphone displays as they suddenly noticed, that their gigantic webprojects just didnt fit on a small clumsy handheld display.

So there came the "handheld" media type, which is one of the types of a CSS file regarding the media type it is intended for. You might have noticed (CTRL+Z) it by " rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" " code in the head of a html file.

Whats wrong with that?

Not much, but the better part is comming,.. People have spent hundreds of hours learning the new aproach to encode style of a webpage. And those who mastered it now can use the tecnique to encode fast loading design, seperately for displaying on a computer screen, a handheld device or even TV. But anyone who tried the teqnique knows that in CSS there is little to no simplicity. A simple task: center a division. Harder: do it for all browsers, forever. :)

Using tables you can expect that content will display in the same manner on any browser, always. Using CSS you have to take in account using javascript corrections for different anomalies that come across. Cross-browser incompatibility is a big problem of CSS design, making even a simple coding task a real quest of many hours wasted,..

It is a complicated system, because different browsers interpret the CSS specification differently. Some do it wrongly. And it has been a hype lately to bash Internet Explorer as "the stupid browser which makes all my CSS code work wrong".

To think of it on a more politically-correct terms. Iits not IE, and not FF. Its the teqnique. Its a bad one as far consistency is considered. And the benefits of being able to develop fast loading sites for anything from a cellphone to a TV display, slowly fade as makers of cellphones start making bigger and bigger display.

Most fun: have you noticed any zooming cellphone-displays lately? :) The latest FF has a neat zooming (CTRL +/-) capability. It zooms all the content of a website, including gif pictures, and thus keeping the structure intact, enabling users to view content as they need it.  Same teqnique is utilised on many newer cellphones and other devices. Thus it is not critically necessery to learn CSS to be able to display content to small devices in the future.

The alternative is so simple. Display it as is, then ZOOM it when needed. Anyhows, learning the fundamentals of CSS is a must for anyone who is into building websites/webapps. Yet not so critically important as some seemed to have pointed out some two years ago. Back then it was the "boooo booo - you wont be able to display amazon on cellphones - learn CSS or die".

I will enlighten you (dear reader) with some of my own CSS adventures and what i had learned from them some time in the future. So come back (see WORK page).

Later, admin

no way, that doesnt make any sense. CSS is far more superior than any table layouts!

@CSS guru, it is superior, but in terms of 'usabillity' it is as complicated as possible. Any approach which can unify the practices for all platforms (most at least) is in my oppinion the right way to go.

Does that make sense?