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Damn you, Internet Explorer, Damn you to Hell

I have all but decided not to use CSS for layouts for the next few years until IE gets its act together and actually supports half the things that other browsers like Firefox and Safari have supported for years.

Over the past couple of years I’ve tried to learn as much about web standards and CSS as I can, and have promoted it heavily to every web designer I encountered. I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable with CSS (this site not being a great example), but I am increasingly running into more and more and more problems when trying to use CSS exclusively for laying out web sites. 99% of these problems come from Internet Explorer, but almost 99% of the internet uses that bastard of a browser, so they don’t see the site as it was intended.

Specifically I’m running into a ton of problems with 3 column layouts in CSS. It drives me nuts. Things get bumped to the bottom of the page, overflow, overlap each other, etc. This stuff just doesn’t happen with tables.

Now I’m not considering going back to 1995 and coding with all nested tables and font tags, not at all. But I am strongly considering doing all of my sites with a basic table for the layout structure, and using CSS for fonts, colors, padding, margins, etc. Especially on 3 column sites like the one that’s giving me problems now.

I know I could fix the problems I’m having, but it would take hours of research and searching for the latest hacks and IE quirks that have to be worked around. These hours could instead be spent by adding features to the site that people will actually notice, or adding more content, or doing more marketing. And really, how many users are going to care if the site is in 100% CSS, or a single table and CSS for the rest? I’m guessing the only people that care are a very small group of anal web designers who make up perhaps .3% of the entire internet population. And frankly I don’t think those people are included in the target audience for any site I’ve ever worked on.

So really, what is to be gained by wasting hours and hours of extra work by making this site work in CSS? I get to display a silly little gif badge on the page saying it’s valid xHTML Strict? Whoopdee doo! And the code size will only be increased by a few bytes. It’s not going to take that much code to make a very simple 3 column table. So instead, it frees up many hours that I can use to add new sections to the site which will generate more interest in the site, I can spend more time marketing the site, I can spend more time doing graphics for the site, I can spend more time posting content to the site, etc.

I still think CSS is great, and saves a ton of time in the long-run, but for some sites like sites with 3 column layouts, it can be more trouble than it’s worth in my opinion. For simple 2 column layouts, etc. I may still use 100% CSS because that’s a lot easier to deal with, but for complex e-commerce and informational web sites, it’s just a lot of wasted time in my opinion. Does that make me a bad web designer? Or am I just being realistic? I mean I’m not getting paid insane amounts of money like Zeldman and other web standards advocates that can spend days fixing an obscure layout bug in IE4.0. I‘m down in the trenches where price is a major selling point. Clients want their sites cheap and fast. They don’t care about web standards, and their customers don’t care about web standards. they just want you to press the buttons for them and get their site online so they can start achieving whatever the goal is for their web site. So do I choose being anal about web standards, spending much more time on development, have to charge more to the client and possibly lose the job because I’ve overcharged? Or do I swallow my pride, fire up Dreamweaver, spit out a site in a few days that still meets or exceeds client expectations, save the client some money, get paid faster, etc? The choice seems obvious to me.

Consider your layout problems solved.

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ThreeColumnLayouts
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=TwoColumnLayouts

I’ve seen all of those before and used them all before, I believe I even used one to start this layout. But it’s not that simple unfortunately. Once you start adding other elements, it starts breaking those templates.

Aww yes the age old question when will IE fix there css problems. You know they will never work out all the bugs with that browser. GRRR> I know how you feel…

I agree, that is just ridiculous. I’ve been working on a webiste for about two weeks now and CSS isn’t getting me anywhere. I’m just gonna have to do the whole thing in dreamweaver… damn…

Welcome BACK to the dark side, young apprentice…