how to position layout? CSS2 or table?

Posted by bm on October 16, 2005, 5:52 am

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If tables drive one nuts, why 99% of "professional" websites I view are
layed out with tables?
E.g.,
www.pwccn.com
www.bain.com
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu
Moreover, what's funny is that you see tons of codes like this--
//==CODES==
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src="/b02/en/images/spacer.gif" width="782" height="1"
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//==CODES==
//
URL(http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0510/article/R0510G.jhtml;jsessionid=034VYSOC4GQSEAKRGWCB5VQBKE0YIIPS?type=F)
//

--as if by magic! I should be overwhelmed with awe if they did that
purely by hand!

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a tool, Dreamweaver?

Anyway, my question is why do they use tables instead of CSS2 for
layout? How did they manage complicated properties of tables like
width, height, align, colspan, rowspan, purely by hand or by WYSIWYG?
If by hand, a change to a common heading would give rise to cascading
changes to many HTML pages. A nightmare.

According to a CSS book I just borrowed from the Shanghai Library, it
says CSS2 supports positioning in 3 ways: absolute, relative and
static. It seems by using CSS2 absolute positioning alone, one can mock
tables. But...it appears CSS2 layout involves careful calculation of
top,left,height,width...And positioning is based on "div class=.." and
in CSS file "..{position=..; top=..; left=..; width=..; height=..}".

How does the idea of "frame" strike you? My humble idea is divide the
page up into fixed sizes of several frames: upper ,left, right and the
central, like the one www.pwccn.com shows. Each frame contains an HTML
page...

There FP offers such a feature called "shared borders". But in the end
I discovers the "frame" is nothing but a table. FP just pieces the
pages together using tables that are interlaced with
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And just now I discovered FP also offers layout tables as attached
snapshot shows..

Now I understand to seperate content from structure is important, and
it's nice that a change in one place will cascade automatically to
other places. And...Are you feeling confused now by what I said? If
not, I already am...