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Web standards, man's worst friend? By: 3Way Marketing

In recent time, there has been talk of 'new web standards'... standards meant to keep the web structured and pages 'well-formatted'. I have been working in the web design and web site development field for near to five years now, and perhaps it’s the "you cannot teach an old dog new tricks" hindrance, but in my view, these 'web standards" folks ought to just let creative designers move on with their jobs and not have to learn ream upon ream of 'new standards' every 5 seconds!

When I started designing web sites, I used image layouts. I literally went into my trusted CorelDraw 9 and laid out my images neatly after that just exported the file to html, uploaded to the web and presto... fresh website!

As time passed though, and I got deeper into it, so various structures involved in design started popping up, css, tags, xhtml, utf-8, unicode....and the list goes on....forever! It was mind boggling, although I suppose, somebody had to read about it, and given that it was my bread and butter....that someone was me. Therefore I read it. I stuck to using tables for my layout and for years now I have completed beautiful web-sites with those same html tables without issues. be it in terms of Website placement, or display.

After that , everyone is pushing me to use CSS as well as div and lists... bah! I have tried to do uncomplicated design with those things and I can enlighten you, it is actually a specialty on its own! You might get it right and smile smugly at your handiwork....until you open the same work in a different browser and the whole thing looks a hodge-podge mish-mash of lines and boxes and misplaced text and images!

You see, just about every month, somebody out there gets the brilliant idea to launch a new internet browser, and while he is doing that, Microsoft, Firefox, Apple Google along with every other big player also decides to add 'new features' to their previously existing browsers... .It’s all part of this so called "browser wars"... ... never ending upgrades.

Anyway, since there are so many browsers on the marketplace, and each utilizes its own standards, designing a web page to appear the same in all of them is impossible....ESPECIALLY if you use CSS and divs.

My solution? Make use of the good old trusted tables. You can't go wrong with that chunky pal. Setting up a layout is a 5 minute affair. Centering it is a matter of editing one tag... and the rest is history. With Divs and CSS....it is a serious mission, comparable to the 'Mission to Mars'! You just cannot be definite what you put together in CSS/Divs will work because you will never be able to test for all browsers.

Thus, web standard compliant or not, I for one will stick to a tried and tested formula... tables. Am I the only one who feels like this? I don't think so