I started writ­ing this entry as a com­ment on Dave Carabetta’s blog but it got a lit­tle long so I decided to explain myself in full here.

Dave posted that he had decided to try mov­ing the HTML cod­ing his com­pany is doing to “standards-based” or table-less lay­out. After fight­ing with some cross-browser CSS prob­lems for an inor­di­nate amount of time he posted his thoughts on the issue in CSS “Stan­dard”? More of a Suggestion…

Fact is, the CSS and HTML spec­i­fi­ca­tions pub­lished by the W3C are not stan­dards or even sug­ges­tions. They are in fact “work­ing drafts” until they become “rec­om­men­da­tions”, and that pretty much sums the issue up — they are not “stan­dards” in the ISO sense of the word. “Standards-compliant” is merely a con­ve­niently descrip­tive term, one that helps con­vey their impor­tance if we ever hope to repair the dam­age to web devel­op­ers’ san­ity caused by the Netscape VS Inter­net Explorer wars of the 1990’s. As for sug­gest­ing that the so-called stan­dard “isn’t much of one” because browser sup­port is not yet 100%, that doesn’t make sense to me — surely that would be the fault of the browsers and not the standard?

Despite all the dis­claimers, cross-browser CSS-based lay­outs are def­i­nitely pos­si­ble and take no more time than tra­di­tional table-based lay­outs. Main­te­nance and upgrades to CSS-layouts are also much quicker and eas­ier. And acces­si­bil­ity becomes that much less of a has­sle with a standards-compliant base to work from.

As many of the com­ments on Dave’s blog reit­er­ated, there’s a learn­ing curve and dif­fer­ent mind­set asso­ci­ated with CSS lay­outs. But once you’re over the “hump”, so to speak, it gets ridicu­lously easy — Perth­Web hasn’t put out a table lay­out in nearly three years, and it takes us no more time than old-school table lay­outs took, despite the fact that we’re now offi­cially sup­port­ing far more browsers than we used to. Many, many com­pa­nies are doing the same thing, because as a web pro­fes­sional it’s your duty to be up to date with the lat­est best prac­tises in your industry.

It’s also not some­thing you’d want to do all by your­self — help is def­i­nitely required. For any­one con­tem­plat­ing mak­ing the move, my rec­om­men­da­tions are:

• Check out Jef­frey Zeldman’s book Design­ing with Web Stan­dards. It’s an easy read, packed full of use­ful infor­ma­tion that’s a mix of how and why.
• Check out the Web Stan­dards Group and css-discuss. Both are fre­quented by some very smart and help­ful peo­ple and nei­ther tol­er­ate off-topic posts so the sig­nal to noise ratio is excel­lent. A small warn­ing: css-discuss has a quite high traffic.
• Make use of pre­built exist­ing lay­outs rather than re-inventing the wheel. There’s some good ones out there. A good place to start is the css-discuss wiki page on css lay­outs.

I’m expect­ing some neg­a­tive com­ments here from those who don’t think CSS lay­outs are worth the effort to learn, but I’m not post­ing this to debate the ben­e­fits, I just want to clear up some points for those who might be interested.