I started this page with a simple enough idea. With some frequency over the past years I've had to delve into people's HTML to try to figure out why it is that the page wasn't loading or was behaving funny.
The sad part is that professional web design seems to be a morass of dubious tricks and halfhearted hacks to try to make HTML work as a layout language and be portable between systems. On a piece of paper, a TV or movie screen or a sheet of canvas you can specify how large each component of your work is going to be and that's it. In HTML, you can't control how large your reader's screen is going to be, how they're going to look at your page or even what fonts they are going to use.
Which brings us to tables, my absolute number one pet peeve in HTML. (As a pet, I've decided to name it "Rufus".) Go and view the source of your favorite site and you'll start to see what I mean. The code consists of Rufus, left right, top, bottom and center. Rufus is used to control page size and contain elements - sometimes even when they're completely superfluous. I have to suspect that many designers just put them in their pages because they think that's how things are supposed to work (geekier details here).
So when I started writing these pages I had a fairly simple goal in mind - to do a moderately interesting job of layout and design without resorting to table hacks for any of it. So far it's been pretty easy; having never learned to depend on Rufus I haven't had to unlearn too many bad habits. Enough people have done superior work with Cascading Stylesheets that it's really been quite simple to get the layout done. (If you're not that impressed with the layout blame the designer, not his tools.) What is interesting to me is the amount of fudging that I have had to do - avoiding certain CSS attributes and checking my work - in order to make the project work out just in Opera and Internet Explorer. Ultimately I don't intend to value the design over the content, but still it's nice to know that one can pull off a halfway professional site without compromising ones standards. Rest assured, if you see a table on these pages it will have real living actual tabular information in it.
A pithier, darker but perhaps more accurate assessment is circulating around Usenet at the moment:
"HTML's a cheap whore. Treating her with respect is possible, and even preferable, because once upon a time she was a beautiful and virginal format, but you shouldn't expect too much of her at this point."
-- Mark "Kamikaze" Hughes