Re: HTML layout question

Hi Ben!

I'm writing an article for A List Apart Magazine (http://www.alistapart.com) about CSS layout and I would like to ask you a question: Why do you use tables for the layout of the PHP site instead of CSS? Is this because your authors don't know CSS, because CSS is unsupported in browsers, because CSS is not powerful enough to lay out your designs or is there another reason? Any response you can give to this question will be greatly appreciated! I'm trying to sum up the situation with CSS at the moment, and look at where it might go in the future.

This is a good question in a good time ;) Some webmasters here try to remake the site to use a positioning-table-less layout. On of those is me, and as I am fairly new to this kind of CSS, I am experimenting with some stuff. I have partitioned the site into smaller blocks, and created a CSS version of the footer [http://goba.hu/phpnetfooter.html]. It works nicely in some browsers, but fails in others. Unfortunately I only had browsers to test, which parsed the footer perfectly. Much of the other elements on the site uses this two columned scheme, one aligned to the left, one to the right (navlinks on manpages, and the header). It is also an ongoing work to make the pages XHTML compatible, with which we made quite a good progress. The manual pages are not XHTML compliant at all, but the other pages are getting to be fine. The reason for the sometimes slow moving progress on the web site is that not much people are working here. But progress is made, and we are moving to the right direction, I beleive. We would very much benefit from a CSS experts help though. Our layout is very simple, uses boxes everywhere, no curves, no special fancy stuff. So it won't be too hard for an experienced CSS designer to create a tableless version of the site. Goba [one webmaster@php.net]