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I found a great article about tables and css, and why you should use css instead of tables. We've had the css vs. tables discussions before, and I think this is a must-read for anyone interested: "Why tables for layout is stupid".

It might be a little long at the beginning, but it gets better towards the end... providing a lot of info and great links like this one for example: css Zen Garden. Just take a look at those styles :-o

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interesting article, but why did all the <li>s' text turn blue when my mouse was over them? made it harder to read . . .

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I didn't even noticed that. I guess it is for emphasizing certain parts like they do here. But I had no trouble reading the blue text though.

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i didn't have any trouble reading it, i just found it distracting. i don't think anything should react to a mouseover unless it's a link and it wants to say "hey, click on me!" which is actually helpful since it makes it clearer to the user that here's something they can interact with.

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Tables are stupid? 8(
I could cry!

I use all css too, but the thing is that it's horribly complicated to make it show exactly right in at least 2 browsers (one reason I gave up on everything other than IE)...

I don't think tables are that ugly... I was experimenting with some stuff with tables... I don't think they look all that bad. (Some of the "News" links on the menu work, the rest is still under construction.)

I don't really think it's a problem with tables it's just bad design that causes problems.... And in most cases sites with tables (when given exact height x width) load faster than sites with pure, ultra complicated css. Example my main page... No tables. No formal paragraphs and takes ages to load.


edit___

There's a mention of large filesizes and bandwith usage....
There are ways to get around this problem...
I don't have huge filesizes (in the experiment) and the pages load fairly faster than if all the table data is stored in the page itself...
I use XSL and an ASP embedded objects.
When the page first loads it might be a little slow... But after the XSL is loaded into the browser cache (much like an ordinary css file or js), the rest of the pages load faster.

Using PHP3 or ASP.NET to parse stylesheets that way can very easily separate presentation from actual data.

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i find that using css for layout makes it a whole lot easier to edit content since your layout and other presentation information is already in a separate file. it's so much easier to read and maintain <div class="something"> than a bunch of <table>s, <tr>s, and <td>s. tables actually had just as many cross-browser compatibility problems for me as css, if not more! usually css problems are that ie is lacking and doesn't support all of it, or does it just plain wrong.

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 Ghostnet


Hehe, and your page looks good in mozilla firebird, but I see some weird changes in IE.
I think your layout is possible to do in CSS, but yes it might be a little hard at first. Especially when you're used to using tables. I know because I'm coding my site to use divs and css instead of tables now, and used tables before this. Steep learning curve.

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i used to have a table layout that made my pages look like engineering paper. now THAT was cool (sort of). it might be tough to layout using css, but i'm sure i could do that too, as long as i still have the images. i've been meaning to add selectable stylesheets to my site, so maybe i should see about bringing back the engineering paper

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hehe.. that would be nice. I already have a little wish-list (including selectable stylesheets) for my next layout, but I haven't even completed the current one yet.
But I'm almost done, I'll put a 'review my site' topic soon in the website/review forum. Then after that I can work on my new ideas hehe.