Layouts

Cactus, remember that portion of the bible that says (paraphrasing), "straight and broad (and I will add "easy") is the road that leads to hell" 

There was a time I would fight to the death to get people to do things the web standards way.  Call it growing up, but I don't do that anymore.  Why help the competition?  If that is what floats your boat, I wish you well.  I made the switch to CSS layout backin 2005, after a visit to Nigerian cyber cafe and seeing how slow a popular site was at the time.  Also, in interviews, if you dare say you use tables for other than tabular data, you might as well kiss that job good bye.  Of course you could argue that you say otherwise just to get the job but come peer review time, you go c ncho 

No more than 4 months ago, I did a site for a local house of reps guy in Nigeria.  The site had so many tables that it took forever to open on a T1 connection in the states.  The guy told me that he couldn't even open it in Nigeria and so wanted "a professional" to redesign it.  To cut a long story short, the site was redesigned and all tables replaced by DIVs.  The kicker?  I reduced the download time from 65 seconds to 32 seconds and this was even given the fact that I used lot of jquery plugins, with the main jquery file taking up 55KB.

So in conclusion, I stopped trying to convince people to make the switch.  I will stick to CSS and whatever new technologies come out b4 I retire and let people use whatever they want to use and offer advice only when sought after.  My motto for 2009 is "Live and Let Live".

i don't want to say much other than, i use CSS if am designing some certain website and i just feel comfortable using my own kinda style ain't talking about Table or whatever,  whatever i wanna use any given time, i make sure i optimized the hell outta the website, so you don't have problem navigating, loading and stuff like that. This website i did along time ago is an example of what am talking about http://www.smsnaija.com/ now how much more clients asking you, i want a WOW website in other words make my website smoky and all that.

Now its left for the designer to know what and what to do to make the website very fast when loaded on the internet. maybe you are to use PS or FW to make the design, slice it, put CSS and FLASH, JQUERY and all that where necessary and making this load fast.  check http://www.soundcity.com/smva/ pretty slow for me

How much more the feel that Nigerians are crazy about.

Techpro, no shortcut at all just do whatever makes you happy,  just have it that CSS Rocks

I have stopped using tables. CSS is lighter, and the pages is easier to maintain. And now, i can convert a css based template into joomla template
in a matter of minutes, following a tutorial i read somewhere. Tables are more complicated, you need to figure out where one TD stops, and one TR starts, and where one table nests the other. . . . . .but with css, your codes are more readable

oh my, am the last person for a theistic reference. I crossed the bridge.

thinking about browser compatibility issues. it is a pain really. wish all browsers use same engines.

Yeah, I have been pretty much doing the same thing for 10 years now.  If not for the passion I have for it, I would have dumped it long time ago.  I recently read an article calling what we do a mystery and as long as when you tell people you are a web developer, they ask, "what is that" or look like at you like a goat in the headlights, your job is safe.  After reading that, I stopped complaining.  After all, the economy is bad

Theistic reference?  Okay, let me rephrase, "good things don't come cheap" 

dhtml, I bought you: hook, line and sinker

browser compatibilities? Yeah I know what you mean.  I personally follow the Graded Browser Support published by YUI.  Also, as of last month, I stopped supporting IE6 on personal projects.

u shd do backwards compatibility *all* the time, within reason of course, with respect to what browsers are used the most 

FF just seem to magically get things right but IE, something always gets screwed.

This is my dream. If this can happen. it will be delightful.

I wish that, Microsoft abandons its IE and fully adopts FF as default browser.

I know this may not even happen because of how tied in IE is to windows OS. But sometimes I just wish. So no one will worry about fixing, patching for IE.

Microsoft should pay all current users of IE 100$

That will take care of switching to FF