----- Original Message -----
From: George Smyth <george.smyth@USNA.COM>
Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 2:40 pm
Subject: RE: Forget CSS, back to tables

> Patrick -
>
> I am in the process of redoing a number of things on our site. My
> originalintention was to forgo tables and do everything through
> style sheets.
>
> I could have written separate style sheets for every browser out
> there (I
> guess I'd have to include Safari - oh boy, yet another browser to
> support),but I'm simply too busy to have to write such support for
> every browser
> that's out there.

I just did a section of the site I work on in all-CSS <http://www.bcr.com/training/>. The advantages (e.g., being able to rearrange the page for printing) outweighed the downside for me. In part, that's because I made several decisions:

1. I decided to follow the lead of Wired Magazine online: I don't care if NN4 users get a degraded experience (i.e., lose the 3-col layout and much of the color) as lo
ng as they are able to view all the content). NN4 users make up about 2.5 percent of our users. This is a particularly wise approach for an ecommerce site, since most versions of NN4 do not provide adequate certificate support for SSL. You want to encourage your viewers to upgrade without cutting them off entiresly.

2. There is a glitch in the layout on IE5Mac, with one column completely overlaying the other. The information in the hidden column is important but not essential, and can be obtained in several other ways (PDF download of the course info, printing the page). I've recently read about a hack in CSS that allows you to send different instructions to IE5Mac within the same CSS file (involves a backslash comment--I need to reread the particulars). When I have some time, I'll look into adding the fix. But it's not a high priority, because Mac users (all browsers) make up only about 1% of our visitors (alas), and, as I said, the info is not "essential" to the utility o
f the page and is obtainable in other ways.

Other than that, the same style sheet has worked in every browser I've checked (IE5&6Win, OperaWin, NN6&7&MozillaWin, ChimeraMac and SafariMac), with only minor variations (popup nav elements are a couple pixels off relative to the base menu between IEWin and Mozilla. I just adjusted their placement to accept the difference--popup menu kisses base menu in one, overlaps base menu by 3 pixels in the other).



Perhaps you're not willing to make the concessions I did to begin moving people forward. Our audience is a tech/IT audience, so I have no qualms about trying to move them forward.

If anyone sees any breakdowns in other browsers with the pages at http://www.bcr.com/training/ , please let me know. The only other problem I've run across is in Safari, which doesn't add the vertical scrollbars to the popup Windows. I intend to send a bug report to Apple, since I attribute this kind of oversight to the beta status of this browser.


--Steve


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