Sent by Eric A. Meyer on 11 October 2002 16:04
Hey folks,
This has already started popping up on other lists and on Web
sites, including mine, but it's very germane to this list as well:
Wired News (http://www.wired.com/) just launched a redesign that uses
no tables for layout. That's right-- none at all. The new design is
all XHTML and CSS, with some simple positioning to set up "columns."
Look for an in-depth interview with the man who drove this change to
appear soon on DevEdge.
There are some XHTML validation problems, as is to be expected
with any seven-plus-years old site with literally thousands upon
thousands of pages of legacy content-- well, that and a failure to
properly encode URLs, but I have confidence they can work that stuff
out. And visiting in older browsers may mean no site layout at all--
NN4.x gets plain text, for example, as the CSS has been hidden from
it. But at least it's readable plain text, and easily accessible to
PDA browsers and non-screen media.
My point here isn't to open debate on whether or not Wired
achieved perfection, because no site ever does; nor to say that "all
sites must follow this example," because not all sites have the same
needs as Wired. It's simply to point out that one high-traffic site
(20-25 million page hits a month) has made quite a leap, and one that
I think is of interest to anyone working with CSS. Dig into their
CSS and see how it works. Get a look at how they handled the
print-style problem, given that their stories are broken up into
sections. Learn from what they did. It's an important move, and I
applaud it.
--
Eric A. Meyer [EMAIL-REMOVED]) http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
"Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/
