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CSS, what about those old tables?

Are you like me and have finally managed to figure out the "new" stylesheet standards?

That is, the system for absolute and relative positioning, left and right float, and so on. Well, you are in for a treat...

Traditional CSS is pretty much designed to display a vertical stack of blocks, piled one on top of another - each containing either another stack of blocks, or text wrapped to fit inside the block. This system has its obvious limitations, and is the reason to why a lot of web designers still use the old HTML table tag when designing web pages.

Tables have actually been part of the CSS spesification since CSS 2.1, but the problem has been that the browsers - specifically Internet Explorer - did not support this specification until the release of IE8.

After the release of IE6, and its established dominance in the market, Microsoft decided (silently) to scale down - or even stop - its browser development and moved its programmers on to other projects. While other browser companies continued to improve their browsers, Microsoft's browser simply hibernated. However, based on Firefox's growing popularity, Microsoft eventually decided to get back into the race and develop new versions of IE. On October 18 2007, IE7 (six years after IE6!) was introduced, however without support for some crucial CSS2.1 support like table layout.

With the introduction of IE8, Microsoft is definitely back in the browser market. IE8 has full support for the CSS2.1 specification. And now the race is on for implementing CSS3.0...

You may read more about CSS tables on http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html.

André Vold

12.03.2009

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André Vold

Her er en rask liten BLOGGER BIO for å fortelle litt om min bakgrunn - og hvorfor jeg valgte programmering som fagfelt.

Jeg vokste opp i Norge, men gikk på universitet i USA. Jeg er sivilingeninør med grad innen "Computer Engineering" fra Arizona State University. Etter utdannelsen flyttet jeg tilbake til Norge, begynte å arbeide på Norsk Data og senere IBM, og tok videreutdannelse på BI innen Master of Management. Etter flere år som divisjonsdirektør i IBM Norge, valgte jeg å starte e-læringsfirmaet Apropos Internett AS . Senere startet jeg også ViroSafe Norge AS som importerer og distribuerer anti-malware og anti-virus software og hardware.

Det har alltid vært essensielt for meg å holde meg oppdatert innen teknologiske endringer og trender - ikke bare for å kunne holde programmeringskunnskaper på topp, men også for min suksess som gründer.

Lumino blogger omfatter en rekke temaer som har vært essensiell for min virksomhet, og som derfor kan være relevant for din.