The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Time to be a little blunt

Posted on December 17, 2005.

To everyone who insists that there are some things that are just easier and more practical to do with tables than CSS positioning:

You suck at layouts. Maybe you should just admit that you aren't very good and stop blaming the technology for your own incompetence.

There. I said it. Elitist, unapologetic, and most likely to get me in lots of trouble. Really though, you shouldn't take that line personally, just understand the kind of sentiment you raise when you start sitting on the fence and playing devil's advocate.

To everyone who insists on supporting old browsers like Netscape 4:

Stop it. The only thing backwards compatibility does is kill technology. It's time to leave the past in the past and move on. The future of the web depends on it.

There. I said it. Brash, inconsiderate, and most likely to get me in more trouble. Really though, you shouldn't take that line personally, just understand what it means everytime you build a website to be compatible with prehistoric browsers.

References: a moron, a devil's advocate, another advocate, and finally a smart thinker.

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4 Comments

1. Monika on December 18, 2005

   Hi Chris
   I'll like webstandards and try to use them, to learn every day/week. Search for news, because I can use CSS, but I'm not a inventor.

   My customers are business men. They would like to make money with their websites in many ways.

   Two days ago I've heard this, then we tested it out and since yesterday I have to realize that google doesn't index text between display none, invisibility hidden, wether in the source nor in an external stylecss.

   Today-it is sunday!- one of my customers call me and would like to have a table layout because he fears to lost his rank in google search index.Not his pagerank.

   Thats reality.
   Business kills webstandards more than the old Netscape. :(

   I'm angry, very very angry about that.

   kindly regards
   Monika

2. Winnie on December 18, 2005

   There are ways to do image replacement without using "display: none" and "invisibility: hidden". The method I use involves using an extra on top of the element that you want the image to replace:

   
A.T. Ferrell agricultural and industrial machinery

   h1.atf-machinery {
   position: relative;
   display: block;
   width: 766px;
   height: 282px;
   margin: 12px auto 0 auto;
   padding: 0
   }

   h1.atf-machinery span {
       position: absolute;
       display: block;
       top: 0;
       left: 0;
       margin: 0;
       padding: 0;
       width: 766px;
       height: 282px;
       background: url(../images/atf-machinery-hdr.jpg) top left no-repeat
   }
   

3. C Montoya on December 18, 2005

   Monika,

   Don't use display:none or visibility:hidden. Use text-indent or position:absolute. Winnie's example is perfect.

   Your customer's problem, however, could still happen with a table layout. Google ignores display:none and visibility:hidden because it could be used to hide content for search engine spamming. You should explain the problem to them and assure them that they can still have great search engine ranking without going to a table layout.

   And you are exactly right. Business kills web standards more than Netscape.

4. C Montoya on December 23, 2005

   Whoops, looks like I left a few colorful words out of my comment filter.

   @ Scott: I deleted your comment. If you want to post again, you'll have to use cleaner language.