Mindstab.net

I'm getting a little frustrated with CSS. It's supposed to be the answer to layout. Tables are bad. Well, yes they are bad as in they mix formatting with content, and make accessibility harder. I agree. And they do need to be done away with. But CSS doesn't seem to provide an elegant way of doing some of thing things tables did. Like full height columns. I've been reading up on them and to achieve them you seem to need ugly hacks. Ugly. How is this convoluted mess of code which uses esoteric parts of CSS I didn't know existed the answer to layout. It's a mess. Just mostly not in the content (although the content is now choker block full of many confusingly layered layers). It's not an elegant solution. I'm not really pleased about it.

Also, after a cursory look, CSS doesn't seem to provide a way to subclass. You define a class and that's that. You get a one shot modification with an id, but that's it. What if you have a blue box, and then many different types. The only way I've seen is to attach all the children names to each parent definition of styles. Again, uglier than needs be. Yes CSS can be made to do just about anything, but it certainly isn't pretty about it. Table layout can be elegant compared to CSS sometimes, not that I'm happy about it.

CSS is frustrating me today. And I'm thinking about whipping up a quick and simple table layout for a site I'm working on. I'd still use CSS for all the styles and stuff, but it'd simply be ugly and a huge hack to make it do the layout as far as I can see.