"It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one."
Part Two
You may recall from Part One that Mr. Web, like most people these days it seems, has grown up quite quickly. In part one of his prognoses, the rise of the semantic web was predicted. In part two Mr Web meets a new stylist.
<style>
.currentStylist { IMHO acronyms and initials are AUTO (Arguably Used Too Often). Financially-challenged jokes aside, almost every industry, it seems, has its own set of little initials you must meet and become acquainted with before you can converse with confidence. The Web is no exception – W3C, HTML, XHTML, SQL, ASP, PHP are but a few of the familiar capital letters to most Web developers. One that is notably missing from the list above is CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. CSS, as all dutiful Web developers know, allow you to specify fonts, detail padding, add background colours etc. Traditionally tables were used for layout in HTML pages – ah the good old days – then, like a bolt from the blue, a rallying cry was heralded that CSS should be used for layout as well. The primary argument was a noble one – it was better semantically – a strict dichotomy of content and presentation. This all seemed fine until people started building sites using CSS to layout a page. Floats or Absolute Positioning were the new tools of choice and all was fine until you looked at your site in another browser and then the tears came. It just seemed that CSS was the best we had but it was like eating soup with a fork – if it’s all you have it’ll do but it’s not really what it’s designed for. }
.theInterviewWithTheNewStylist { CSS level 3 comes equipped with the right tools for layout – tables. What? Yes, CSS3 allows DIVs to be specified as table-cells and table-rows etc. This allows for the separation of content and presentation. CSS3 promises a host of other tools (currently implemented in browser-specific CSS) for layout including: a CSS Template Layout Module; CSS Columns; CSS Grid Positioning Module. Surely this all sounds too good? }
.whenCanYouStart { CSS3 tables are arguably not without their problems but, potentially, the biggest one is that IE6 and IE7 don’t really understand them. Some would argue that the way to push users to upgrade is to simply not make your site look nice when viewed on those platforms. This seems rather inconsiderate and for most of us we will have to produce IE6 and IE7 versions if we do progress to the new layouts. This said, there are times when IE specific styling is used anyway and so why not build using the latest techniques that allow less work across modern versions of browsers (IE8, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) and then cater for IE6 and IE7? It looks like the new stylist can start right away. }
</style>
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