18th Jul 2004
CSS Wont Drink Me Under The TABLE
I was originally going to entitle this “Nazi CSS Punks Fuck Off”, in the spirit of the DK’s …
“Punk ain’t no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain’t hardcore cos you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head”
- Dead Kennedys
But suddenly hit with a wave of mellowness, I backed off from that.
See, I was thinking of converting my resume to a completely CSS-driven document. No tables. In the words of an old /* C Comment in the BSD Source */, it was “too painful to do right”.
Here’s what I want:
Should be cinchy, right? I even wrote about this sort of thing last October. I hunt around for examples, and what I basically find is nice articles about doing 2 or 3 column layouts… but I’m not seeing examples of “row after row of 2 columns”, where each cell (table lingo) can be highly variable in vertical size.
And it seems I’m not alone:
Don’t get me wrong. I do love CSS, and yes, I appreciate the efforts of those who are trying to promote its use. I can curl up with a nice CSS book by the fireplace, sitting on a bearskin rug, sipping a nice 2000 Syrah from Roshambo Winery (in lovely Healdsburg, CA) – eyes glazing over as I try to absorb the merits of relative vs absolute positioning, floats, voice hacks, and all the rest (this is not true – I don’t own a bearskin rug). I do get a lot done with CSS. But somehow, some way, trying to duplicate the basic functionality of table layout across all current browsers is a waste of time. Show me the examples! How is it done without a bunch of ugly hacks? I’m starting to lose my hair, so I’m not going to pull it out for CSS. For a woman, yes! But not for CSS!
So my conclusion after all of this, after this ramble of ranting tone, is that I will use tables for the absolute skeleton of my resume, and season carefully with assorted CSS spice. Just don’t ask me to throw out the baby tables with the CSS bathwater. Nah gonna do it.
