My New Site

[FrankT]

My site is up! It's http://www.franktuttle.com . Check it out; there's a blog and a guestbook.

Thanks to Matt for his help in getting it up and running. It's a simple site -- I tried to keep the poor dial-up user firmly in mind -- but I think it's a good start.

Enjoy!

[Zoffix Znet]

My first site looked something like that And if you are "keeping dial-up user in mind" then CSS is your friend. Here is why tables are bad: http://xrl.us/jx7f Here are some examples of tableless layout: http://xrl.us/iawr Here are some schools that will get you started with CSS if you are interested: www.blooberry.com/ , www.htmlhelp.com/ , http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ , www.brainjar.com/ , www.htmldog.com/ , http://css.maxdesign.com.au/

[Matt]

Tables are bad

Well your beef would be with the authors of Wordpress and in trying to convince them that tables should be removed. that is the software used for Franks blog and as you can see, tables or no, it looks pretty spiffy IMHO.

I find sometimes you simply need tables for cross-browser.

Lets not forget GlowHost as an example site of a layout that does not use tables. Only a small handful (if that) use tables.

[jmarcv]

CSS doesn't suck - you suck at CSS.

Cool! A CSS vs Tables war! Let me remind you, look on your site. See that section ehere there is text covered by your div that says
Fv<|<

So lets see, my client is concerned about the time I am spending on their site, but I just throw them a link to csszengarden, and sudden; their eyes glaze over and relax.

Nice dream. Everytime I follow this sort of mantra I end up saying stuff like you stuff into those pesky DIVs that cover your text. <g>

My first site looked something like that

Looked like what? Something that worked? LOL

Seriously, CSS is great but who has the budget to support it?

[Zoffix Znet]

Tables are for tabular data, I don't get what text you are talking about that gets covered, but CSS can be used for image replacement. And what about that "budget" thing? CSS will save you huge amounts of money on redesigns, and even on designs. It is much faster/easier to make a working layout with CSS than with tables, and think about redesigns. Ever passed a table-based layout through a screen reader? Sure IE is a bug herder but the fix is usually 1-2 lines of code, sure IE doesn't support a lot of stuff, just don't use it. Just like my signature says man...

[jmarcv]

Yeah, you had a DIV with the F word covering up some bulleted text, but I see thats been fixed.
... and MySQL sucks at CSS and so does the guy who built one of my clients sites billing at 5 times what it took me to just do it in tables, not that I wanted to.... I really DID want it in CSS, but I am surrounded by people who suck at CSS.
...and I suck at calculus, thats why I use a calculator.
My point is, CSS has some big flaws in my mind. Crap! I looked at some code and it reminds me of a while back when I had to wirte my javascript 4 different ways to deal with the quirks of each browser!

So yeah, I know all about the hype, and the this and the that and that I suck, but I don't see many people a lot better, and I see success in baby sites, and once they start getting complicated, then your 'suck' level goes up real fast.

I think CSS is a great thing, but I don't think its implemented very well and causes frequent problems.

So if you are such a guru, are you for hire? I wouldn't hire you for dynamic pages, which like CSS is the way it should be <g>

Static pages are for static content <lol>

But seriously, if you want to get some non-working css working again for me, we can continue this discussion off forum.

[andychev]

The good old css argument, the trouble is that people forget about the whole point of a website and care more about how good their code is / isnt / could be / might be. The average person on the web looking at sites doesnt have a clue about any of that they just care that the site is user friendly and as long as it looks good the code doesnt matter.

I guess the argument is that it will load point something of a second quicker but these days with the majority of people having broadband 'sloppy' website design doesnt have a detremental effect on performace in the slightest. A couple of extra lines of code here and there isnt going to matter to the person looking at the site. As long as the site works and is cross browser compatible then surely there must be something more important to worry about!

My opinion on this has changed considerably over the past few years with broadband becoming widespread and webservers being so good, there is no longer the need to keep code to a minimum and worry about doing something the long way instead of the efficient way.

If you are someone who is a code perfectionist (i know several!) then if you really want a challenge then go into mobile phone programming as you will make a lot of money! They have so little processing power and you have to think that for every instruction you are using battery power. People who program mobile phones are frankly amazing and they have a real purpose for making code the very best it can be because of the situation they are faced with. I dont think this is the case any more on the web.

[Matt]

See the problem in that thinking is servers are no different than cell phones. They both have a limit to how much they can process.

Sure, for 90% of the sites out there, its definately not an issue of the code is a junk show. However, for those handfulls that turn into overnight success stories optimized code is extremely important not only for quick layout changes but also for dishing out more web pages per machine.

Look at google for example. My thinking on them is they went as light weight as possible so they could serve the most pages possible per unit whereas something like Yahoo probably proceesses about 1/4 maybe 1/2 the pages per unit as google. (who knows?)

I don't know the figures but I can tell you google's site is easier to change layout and that can cram a lot more requests on their machines than yahoo!

[jmarcv]

Amen Andy.

Interesting about the mobile phone programming. Reminds me of my machine language days, when optimizing code was to count the CPU clock cycles for different methods. That may be dating me... <g>

[jmarcv]

Yes Matt, you are correct, and I agree totally because my job is optimizing, as you know <g> but ultimately I think andychev is saying that a page of DIVs will display faster than a page in a table, and the server will have the same load either way, and that broadband will compensate for the need to 'interleave' your page.