Review of Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong

http://www.uncoverr.com/everything-you-know-about-css-is-wrong-review/

by nreece • 18 years ago

7 12 18 years ago

olavk4• 18 years ago

The review is pretty vague, but presumably the book is about the display: table CSS property, which IE8 will support as the first IE browser.

The review says "the techniques that will be available to us very, very soon." Actually the techniques have been available for years in the other browsers, but obviously couldn't be used widely since IE didnt support it. The release of IE8 will not change that because IE7 (and even IE 6) will be around for many years to come.

But of course it is a step in the right direction.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

The title makes it sound like it's an informative article but as olavk mentions, it's a review and a rather vague review at that.

moe3• 18 years ago

Very vague article, indeed, looks like they're mainly trying to stir some hype for their book. Praising css tables as "the next big thing" is just backwards. Matt Wilcox has a good article about that misconception: http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/1030/

The take-home is that css tables are really not much more than the old table tag in disguise - with all the same ties between markup and presentation. If that's what rocks your boat then you don't have to wait - the table tag is here for you to use, today.

olavk4• 18 years ago

Well, all of CSS is the HTML layout model in disguise.

The lack of IE support for display:table has lead to a number of myths, one beeing that the CSS layout model is somehow different from the defacto HTML layout model. It is not. The CSS layout model was from the beginning modelled as close as possible after the de-facto layout model of presentational HTML. For example, floats are not an CSS invention, they are just a reverse-engeneering of the good old align="left" attribute which Netscape invented.

The difference is just that CSS gives more fine-grained control, and that CSS allows better abstration and seperation between markup and presentation. This is obviously good in itself, so clearly display:table is an improvement over HTML tables - but not in its layout capabilities.

moe3• 18 years ago

What improvement over HTML tables does display:table provide? I see none. It requires the identical nested markup, except that all your tr's and td's are called div now. Really, why would anyone even consider using display:table instead of a plain old <table>?

dimitry• 18 years ago

This book is mostly about styling tables. So as a response to the title: I highly doubt it!

arockwell• 18 years ago

No, its about the new display: table property, which really will make life easier. However, IE 6 and IE 7 don't support it, so in about 5-10 years this book will be relevant.

axod• 18 years ago

And in another 10-20 years, you may be able to do with css, what you've been able to do with <table> for years.

ConradHex• 18 years ago

The first that popped into my head was that the title could be truncated to "Everything About CSS is Wrong".

Review of Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong

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