RE: [MACCAWS] Webmonkey article: Web Standards for Hard Times

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But I count three CSS hacks, two levels of nested divs, one markup hack,
and a partridge in a pear tree to get it all working. Apparently we've
traded a big stinking pile of table tricks for a big stinking pile of
CSS tricks. It's not more semantically pure, it's not more accessible,
it's not easier to maintain. Why is this progress?
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He has a very good point here. What I'm asking is: Should we be pushing
workarounds/hacks to work WITH the older browsers, or settle with
(possibly) less visually appealing & precise layouts which ARE cleanly
laid out but still remain W3C compliant.

Thoughts? Am I even making sense? ;)

______________________

<tired type="needsleep" />

I think we touched on this before in that it's all well and talking up
css over, say, font tags and tables etc, but there aren't many truly
eye-candy gorgeous sites out there.  Businesses are going to want
investor/customer baiting eye candy.  Sure you can still achieve this in
tables and make it validate but if we go too hard core for css, then we
might lose a few people.  I've yet to find anyone who can honestly claim
that development time in css is as quick or quicker than tables.  And,
as we all know, time is money - and it's a Commercial case that we're
trying to make.

Don't get me wrong - I love css and am in the process of banishing it
from our work intranet (oh how I love my tag stripper  and close tags
extensions!), but I don't want to see us going wrong.

If we're going to get businesses to look at this, I can see them getting
their web people to look at what we're saying in terms of money,
investment and probably code.  If we're seen to be pushing for standards
and then pointing at css based layouts that involve all kinds of
hacks...... Is this a good thing?

The question is (apart from when will that damn car alarm over the road
shut up) how do we deal with, say, css hacks?  There are a couple of box
model hacks - some validate, some don't.  Do we pick the one that
validates or do we treat them both as hacks?

I hope this makes sense!

Francis