CSS is seriously broken

[Retlak]

A week ago I decided to convert an old web site from frames to a
frameless layout.

I'd done this before with a different website, converted from layout
using frames to layout using tables. Pretty easy.

But this time I thought - table layout is obsolete too, time to learn
CSS.

A task that would have been trivial, and taken maybe an hour, using
tables, has wasted about a week of my time. Layout that is trivial
with tables is very difficult with CSS. There are lots of websites
with advice on how to get 2-column layout ... how to ensure that the 2
columns look the same length even when their content is not the same
length ... how to position a footer so that it's right at the bottom
of the page ... but the very proliferation of such websites indicates
that something is wrong. I remember that when tables came out, it took
under an hour to come up to speed. Frames were very intuitive, too.
The model was CLEAR. You didn't need websites explaining how to do
simple layouts with tables or frames.

The layout model for CSS is NOT clear. Simple layouts, that used to be
trivial with frames or tables, should be simple to create. In my
opinion, the people who developed CSS have botched the job. They were
sidetracked into enabling all kinds of fancy effects and they lost
sight of the main goal.

Question is, what do we all do now? Go back to using tables for
layout?

 

[Martin Honnen]

[difficulties with CSS based layout]

Unless you are trying to style some XML document your post seems
off-topic here. Maybe you are looking for
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

 

[Johannes Koch]

[difficulties with CSS based layout]

Unless you are trying to style some XML document your post seems
off-topic here. Maybe you are looking for
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

And in case the OP wants to style some XML (not XHTML), the browser
doesn't know anything about tables/frames. So the OP would have to use
"display: table/table-row/table-cell", which is provided by CSS. But
then he would probably see that WinIE does not support this and would
hopefully blame the browser vendor, not the CSS authors.

 

[Retlak]

[difficulties with CSS based layout]

Unless you are trying to style some XML document your post seems
off-topic here. Maybe you are looking for
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

Layout of XML is what CSS is for, so my post is not off-topic. The
world can't move to XML for websites until there is some layout
mechanism - today, CSS is all there is.
The techniques I mentioned which refer to XHTML are simply used as
examples of clear models.

 

[Mark Preston]

[difficulties with CSS based layout]

Unless you are trying to style some XML document your post seems
off-topic here. Maybe you are looking for
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

Layout of XML is what CSS is for, so my post is not off-topic. The
world can't move to XML for websites until there is some layout
mechanism - today, CSS is all there is.
The techniques I mentioned which refer to XHTML are simply used as
examples of clear models.

The problem is, you didn't say what the problem was. CSS is definately
not "broken", but a lot of implementations of it in browsers
(especialy the Microsoft browsers) is broken.

If you could be more detailed about your problem, perhaps we could
help and you can move on.

 

[Mike Partridge]

Layout of XML is not the only thing for which CSS is used; at my
company we apply CSS stylesheets to plain old HTML. Also, CSS is not
all there is for applying layout to xml documents. XSL:FO can be used
for website design as well as printed output. Much of the world has
already moved to XML based websites, notwithstanding the problems
you're having with CSS.

[difficulties with CSS based layout]

Unless you are trying to style some XML document your post seems
off-topic here. Maybe you are looking for
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

Layout of XML is what CSS is for, so my post is not off-topic. The
world can't move to XML for websites until there is some layout
mechanism - today, CSS is all there is.
The techniques I mentioned which refer to XHTML are simply used as
examples of clear models.