by Karina Beattiger 19.February 2008 12:50
I realize that I'm behind the times. In fact, if "behind the times" were annotated in CSS, I'd be at the position marked -9999em, sitting next to some kind of tag marked ‹blink›, peering into an empty coffee mug and wondering where it all went wrong. "I used to be the hot thing," ‹blink› would say, mournful and inconsolable. "Everyone used me on everything. I got attention, man. I got the vibes."
All right, so maybe I'd be quite a bit ahead of ‹blink› in the linear display of things. I hated flashing text even when it was the 'cool' thing to do; any text that has to be read by coordinating your rate of blinking with the text's rate of blinking is decidedly Too Much Effort(tm).
What I mean to say is this: There was, once upon a time, a self-taught web designer (and we use this phrase loosely) who found the glory of all that is tables. And like any prophet finding the word of whatever deity of choice, she delved right into the realm of tables and spread the good word. And the good word was a bad, bad idea. Tables, she has come to find out, are not the word of the web design gods. Tables are a tool, a utility, and one to be used sparingly. All the wonderful, pretty, tables-inspired designing she was doing was only leading to one thing:
A Mess.
You may add a (tm) if you wish.
With the false idol of tables receiving so much of my-- that is, her attention, the glories of the next true designer's medium, CSS, went by virtually unnoticed. "Look at me," she'd say happily, mired in tr and td and colspan and such. Rows upon rows, spacer images, all to achieve the very same, nearly effortless look of CSS templates everywhere. "Beautiful designs, beautiful, lovely designs!" Designs that took hours. Even with the help of such programs like Dreamweaver and Fireworks, websites that should only take a few hours took days. Granted, some of that was coming up with content -- nothing says attention like text to read! -- but once a design was set, once the header was up and tables in place, a single change meant a recut of the whole site.
And then let's not even go into the problems involving editing a textual header or the way links work. Page by page, manual editing of code so lovingly crafted before. It took forever to load. And iframes, dear me, the iframes...
... All right. Here I go.
My name is Karina, and I'm a recovering tables addict. I'm 1 month clean and counting.
Mindfly, and particularly Webdeveloper Weems over there, has been instrumental in my (admittedly rapid) conversion to CSS design. Like a moth to a bright, bright flame, I have left the Stygian shadows of tables behind me and haven't looked back since. Transcending CSS, by the apparent CSS rockstar Andy Clarke, is a fascinating read, and it's truly amazing how much of the theory I had already managed to grasp through my own flailing before finding the technical jargon that goes with it.
Does this mean I can be a Real Designer, too?
As the newest and greenest assistant at Mindfly, I look forward to the shattering of the chains of table worship. By Crom, there will be shattering!
p.s. To my utter dismay, I am aware that text-decoration: blink is more widely supported, but I am choosing to be selectively inattentive to such matters.