Be Excellent To Each Other

I've been putting this site together as a favour for a friend:

http://www.imaginames.co.uk/

He's been coming round and we've just been working through it a page at a time adding stuff in and shuffling it round. It was my intention to get the design finalised and then rip out all the tables and replace them with css (I'm just not quick enough at figuring out css to work on something with someone sat next to me). However I'm wondering precisely why I should bother. It seems to index ok and display fine on various browsers, phones and iPads and whatnot. If there's a single compelling reason to bother then I will do.

I've done sites using pure css for layout before and I can see the benefits in terms of managing larger sites but here I'm just not so sure.

Being the jerk that I am...

"...gift will be totally unique and the only one of it's kind."

...doesn't need the apostrophe.

Cheers dude, hadn't spotted that.

Or the "and the only one of its kind", given that's what unique means.

NOT RELEVANT THOUGH.

Uh - Aren't there accessibility reasons for not using tables?

More apostrophe stuff that I'm actually unsure of. In the first paragraph, should it be children's or childrens' ?

Anyway. I think that if you test it in a variety of browsers/screen readers and it still looks fine, then leave it as tables.

Or there used to be a site that would take a tables based site and convert it to CSS free of charge, because the guy hated table layouts so much.

I guess screen readers might be an issue, though I'd be a bit surprised if they haven't reached the point where they can deal with layout tables. But in this specific case I don't think that too many blind people are going to be shopping for artwork. I know they are for presents and that but still.

I'll definitely mention it to him, though.

If it's going to take you longer to do the rest in CSS and it looks ok in what you've tested it on then I'd say stick with tables.

I AM THE CASCADING STYLE SHEET!

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's only one person working on it so it doesn't really matter.

Layout / code separation evangelists can suck a dick, anyway.

There are many good arguments for pure CSS layouts, but the major one I can think of is being able to change the entire design of the site purely by changing the stylesheet. You need not change a single thing in any of the pages themselves. That can be incredibly useful.

If you never plan on doing that, and find tables easier, meh, fuck it. Might as well. If I'm being lazy on something I'll still use tables.

You might want to consider the "last a lifetime" comment. Might be construed as an offer to provide a lifetime warranty and open you to complaints/chargebacks indefinitely.

It's a really nice idea, though. Good luck.

The major one I can think of these days is making a site responsive to different viewports. Just through using CSS, you can make a site that works across desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, all running from the same code.

With a site like this one, but most sites with any complexity appear to have so many divs going on for layout that you really can't.

Comments are king.

You need a capital C on Christmas.

Assuming we're still talking about imaginames.co.uk, it's on a basic grid that would actually make it perfect fodder for responsive web design.

And tables.

Psh, It should be using frames.

Good idea, I shall redo it using nested frames. 12 deep.

Also, some scrolling text or blinking text would really liven that site up. Maybe some cursor sparkles, if you're feeling adventurous. Do page transitions still work?

Well, yes, but it's not 1997 any more, and tables aren't really suitable for responsive design, and therefore means the site won't work terribly well on mobile.

If a bit of display CSS is deprecated in a later design, you can just set it to invisible. I do that to cut out annoying parts of Wordpress themes that don't allow full customisation. It's not ideal, but it's better than trying to remove that bit entirely with various floats and relative positions going on all over the place.

While I am a fan of CSS (especially the new animation stuff in CSS3 which I'm getting pretty hot at) I do wish they'd sort out grid layouts. And vertical aligning.

Tried something like Bootstrap?

Sure, but if I just want a simple three-column layout it's a bit much to have to install a library.

I know it's possible without it, it's just such a faff.