I’m a bit of a geek at heart having taught myself how to write html to create web pages back in 1999 from a great book by Elizabeth Castro. In it Elizabeth talked a bit about using CSS (cascading style sheets) to easily manage a websites look, without having to trawl through pages of html to code if you want to change a colour or font. As soon as I realised this, I was so excited and used them in every site I created.
However, it was still the norm to use html tables to control the layout of the content of the page but I was very good and made sure I didn’t nest tables within tables within tables as it slows the download of the web page and completely screws up things for people trying to view things with special readers if they have impaired vision, for example.
Well, although I’ve stopped writing my own code I still like to see what the geeks talk about and subscribe to newsletters from Sitepoint. In the one I received today, they included a YouTube video discussing their latest book about using CSS tables, which will be compatible with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).
Personally I agree with them that this is something that developers should be paying attention to – what do you think?