I remeber back in highschool. I had a few classmates that were into Linux. I mean not just into Linux … they were fanatics. Windows was the work of evil. Command line was better then GUI and I guess typing commands in the black screen made them feel hackerish :)
If you were trying to have a sane discussion with them to explain Windows is and will always be better they would become hysterical and eventually you would ask them: do you like games? What serious games work on Linux? This was the moment when they were starting to cry and, between hickups, they would say: Linux is best! Linux is best!
Unfortunately, today, I get the same experiences with TABLEs. Tables are evil! Tables are not good! Tables take too much code! and the reasons of the fanatics never end but revolve around the Tables are evil but I don't know why concept.
People went crazy about compliance. Does my site validate? Does my site validate? Some people waste days or weeks to get the sites to validate on complex layouts. My Site Does No Validate! It's simple for W3C to issue standards and how it should work technical specifications but the main question is not if you page validates but …
Does you web-browser validate?
Opera and Firefox do a pretty good job but I'm afraid to open Internet Explorer to see how my site looks! Internet Explorer is CSS Resistant! They don't mix for anything advanced. W3C has the specs clear on CSS display directive but IE does not care. And most people use IE.
Anything can be completed with the right method and IE specific adjustments.
Unfortunately in the real world, where developers live, the time one spends to get a tableless layout working is unacceptable. Most high ranking sites use table layouts. There are some layouts that can not be achieved in all browsers with a decent amount of code.
I want a layout with 3 rows and the 2nd row split in 3 equally high columns independent of content size plus some vertical alignment of content in one of the columns.
Nobody wants to see how this is made to work and that CSS code needs special tricks for IE only.
Just look at this page that is related to the DIVS replacing TABLEs theory. I'm 100% nobody will read this as people have work to do on their sites.
… for anything except some serious layouts and tabular data. Untill all CSS Display directives : table, table-row,table-column,table-cell and so on will work how they should on all browsers, the elegant and easy to use tables are here to stay. Perhaps in 5 years or more we can say that tables are gone fo good.
<table>
<tr>
<td></td><td></td>
</tr>
</table>
