Another man’s utopia

“There isn’t much to watch on American TV now unless you are into violence and/or canned laughter. Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead? It seems appropriate.”

The Guardian interviews sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin. Sadly, my only exposure to Le Guin was a mini-series of her novel Lathe of Heaven on A&E, an American television network.

It was a good concept: a man whose dreams can alter reality, and his psychologist who finally decides to use this power to his advantage. In the interview, Ursula explains that Taoist philosophy was the primary inspiration.

Under the <table>

Richard McManus comments on the now legendary HTML tables vs. CSS layout debate. Web designers should use CSS layouts instead of hacking tables together. Sure, tables are easier to understand and set up, but CSS is easier to change, easier to migrate to new formats (think portable devices), and makes more logical sense.

TABLE is an ugly hack, back when there was no real way to display column layouts on the web. Their intuitive nature is probably why they replaced frames as the way to place content adjacent to each other.

So really, both camps are right. Either implementation is transparent to the user, so they shouldn’t care. But developers should care. CSS will make your jobs easier.

There are some reasons for sticking to tables, however:

  • support for Netscape 4.7: Sadly, it’s still around, especially inside companies.
  • workaround for IE’s multiple CSS bugs
  • you are too lazy/too busy to concentrate on laying out a CSS layout, and this web job is just a one-time deal.