Christian Ross

When the Internet was a young pup, building websites with a table-based layout was great. Developers had a grid easily at their finger tips and everything fell into place. As WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver came along, the ability to click a couple of buttons and drag your content into place was a dream. Need to join a couple of cells just like you would in Excel? No problem. Need a whole row or column? Easy. At the turn of the century, almost everything on the web was wrapped in some form of table with inline styling code to get items on your page to look exactly right. And this was OK.

The code behind a site was long and unruly but the limitations of browsers at the time made it the standard for developing on the web and nobody knew any different.

Thankfully the people behind web standards (W3C, etc) and browser manufacturers (Microsoft, Netscape) didn’t sit on their laurels and watch everything become stale. Through concerted efforts they pushed forward with ideas of a semantic web through new languages/technologies like CSS.

As CSS was developed and adopted, it became smart to separate your page content (what you’re currently reading) and your page structure/styles (the layout/colors). A new wave in web creation was starting to catch on somewhere around late 2002 to early 2003. Books were printed, conferences were started, blogs were in full swing and you were more than likely to be called a hack or similar if you didn’t jump on the semantic web bandwagon.

Tables became low-rent where as CSS was the penthouse. The ability to tie a stylesheet to your website was a treat and the ability to target certain browsers was a blessing (until everyone realized that it was purely for the sake of rescuing Internet Explorer). Layouts no longer had to conform to a certain grid and you started to see some real innovation in designs. Tables had been put into their place and allowed by many only for one purpose, storing data.

As our device innovation grew, so did the need for flexibility in our websites. The development and adoption of CSS made the transitions to most of the new mediums relatively seamless where table-based layouts would have struggled mightily. First was the printer and their counterpart the print stylesheet. Then came the larger monitor and thus our designs grew as well. Not too far after we all grew the display size of our websites, laptops became more widely accepted thus making us rethink our need for larger displaying websites. The hand held PDAs like the Dell Axiom, Palm Cliq and Handsprings of the world. Now what? CSS to the rescue. The mobile world was spun on its head in 2007 by Apple and others quickly followed with the ability to view our sites in more ways than one. Full screens, mobile versions, zoomed in and more. More stylesheets. Thankfully with their latest invention, they realized our eyes get worse as we age and decided to increase the screen size this time around.

Through most of these hardware innovations though, sites built with tables as their framework probably suffered in some form or fashion. Either squished content, horizontal scrolling of content or worst of all, no content.

In the end, I am grateful for the advances of the web through technologies like CSS, JavaScript and yes, when appropriate Flash.

For my confession of “improper coding,” I might get punished. And without knowing for sure, I think I might have already been. More than once.

In the last couple of months, I have been approached by a couple of different firms looking for somebody to come on board to help them by doing what I do, for them¹. It’s only by coincidence that they both happen to be in New York but I don’t think it’s by coincidence that after speaking with people from both firms and pointing them to my portfolio that radio silence commenced. My initial conversations with both companies went well including multiple interactions with each and the signing of some paperwork to promise that I wouldn’t disclose any of their secrets.

With one of the firms I had multiple exchanges with the lead designer and with the other was the lead technologist. Once it was time to move forward I was promised a conversation with a/the lead developer to discuss further. My contact info was forwarded and that’s where our discussions have ceased. I have attempted to follow up with each one but my correspondence seems to fall on deaf ears.

I have no way of knowing the exact reasons, but one I thought I keep coming back to is the fact that in my portfolio are a number of sites coded with tables. If that is the case, it only saddens me that I never had the opportunity to explain or share the details behind each website. I suppose this will have to suffice.

Which makes me wonder, how often do I give the benefit of the doubt? Rarely, at best. In court it’s innocent until proven guilty but in the court of public opinion it’s quite the opposite. I am guilty of using tables in my code but it is only half of the story. I have been hired to provide a service, working with an existing platform for a client that only cares that their product works as advertised and is presented on time.

I’ll take guilty and feeding my family over innocent and starving every time.