Whaaat? You’re Chinese and haven’t had preserved eggs before?

That's because I don't like congee! I like salted duck eggs, but I can't say I've ever tried preserved or fermented egg like the century egg.

Agassi going bald is proof that God has a sense of humor.

Dui bu qi, wongvee - chinese language pack isn't installed in Neatorama's wordpress :)

Thanks 6ixty, but overflow:hidden itself has problems.

It's not my intention to bait anyone with the heading "Christianity Killed the Ancient Olympics." I thought it was a straight forward statement saying that the new dominant religion in the Roman Empire (Christianity) saw itself as incompatible with the Ancient Olympics, because it was a pagan festival (which it was - the Ancient Olympics was a festival honoring Zeus).

It is my understanding that Early Christanity was a minority religion in the Roman Empire and that early Christians were persecuted.

After Constantine I converted to Christianity, the persecuted religion (surprise!) turned into a persecuting one: The Roman army sieged and conquered Jerusalem, and destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

Pagans were persecuted as well (Theodosius II ordered all non-Christian books to be burned in AD 448 and idolatry to be punishable by death in 451! Emperor Anastasius ordered Gentiles in Asia Minor to be exterminated, etc.)

Indeed, here's a quote from the Christianity Today article that Another Jake suggested:

in a.d. 393, Roman emperor Theodosius banned the Games, along with other festivals, for being "too pagan." Under the emperor's direction, fanatical Christians closed and later tore down ancient wonders of the world, most notably the Temple of Zeus built in Olympia and the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria. Search a bit more, and you might discover Theodosius's successor, Theodosius II, ordered his Roman army in 426 to demolish the impressive stadium of Olympia, which could accommodate more than 40,000 spectators at its peak.

History is history. A lot of brutal things were done in the name of religion.

Zach: You just named 3 ways that CSS is better than tables. You claim because it is only “slightly” better it isn’t worth doing. I find your position to be untenable.

I named 3 advantages of CSS that turned out to be minimal, 3 that turned out not to be advantages at all, and 2 disadvantages of CSS (one of which turned out to be a fatal flaw for me to consider using it on this blog).

Let me expand on the two disadvantages of CSS:

1. It's buggy - different browsers implement/support CSS differently.

See, for example this chart at Westciv and you'll see that even IE 7 don't support some element type properties that Safari and Opera browsers do.

I'm sure a very experienced web designer can tackle any and all inconsistencies across browsers, but that's actually very hard to do. This gets complex very, very fast:

Take for instance this article by Rob Swan at A List Apart just a couple of weeks ago. It's how to produce a layout with a flexible-width column that fills out the browser space with a fixed-width side column (for navigation, for instance).

This is dead simple to do with tables, but as you can see in the article, it's HARD to do with CSS.

Let's take a look at another example: absolute vertical and horizontal positioning, this time an article at Perishable Press.

Again, dead simple to do with tables, but very convoluted if you have to do it purely with CSS.

2. CSS doesn't handle error well

I think this is worth repeating, because this is the main problem I have with implementing CSS on Neatorama (and the one that you didn't address in your reply)

If your website is a static one, then this is not a problem. But say you have a blog like Neatorama: it has a simple layout. Not counting the header and footer rows, it's basically a two fixed-width column design, centered on the page.

The left-hand side column is 500 pixels wide. This is where the content of the posts go.

With CSS, if someone accidentally upload an image that is larger than 500 pixels wide - say 501 pixels, then the two column layout completely falls apart. But with table, everything is fine - the table column just stretches a little bit.

So far, no one can tell me how to solve this problem with CSS (maybe you can do it with a tricky javascript to detect widths of each img elements but that solution is worse than simply doing a table). If you know how that is solved, 6ixty, then please let me know. I've looked for it, and I couldn't find a trivial solution.

@Daelan: the separation of content and layout has become a mantra that in many instances go too far.

Have you programmed in PHP? The beauty of that language is how it plugs into HTML very easily - but someone decided that there should be a separation between content (the code) and layout (HTML) and created a web template system for PHP called Smarty.

I've had the misfortune of having to code something with smarty before. It was miserable. Something that should've been straightforward became so convoluted.

Re: changing 200 page websites using CSS or templates. I used to work with a website that has thousands of pages - and I opted to use templates because it's much more powerful than CSS. (It really should've been done on a dynamic system, but I couldn't change that. Fine, you work with what you have.)

Why? Because subsets of pages share differing sets of web elements. For instance, a set of pages have the same header bar and navigational bar. A different set of pages share the same header bar as the first set, but a different nav bar. Another set has different header bar but the same nav bar. And yet another set have different header and nav bars. Confused yet? Worse, some have OPTIONAL nav bars that may or may not change depending on the particular page.

This was very hard to do with CSS (keeping track who has what) but very easy to do with templates (and sub templates, and if necessary, sub-sub templates).

All I had to do was find the element I wanted to change - find the right template (or sub template). Change that ONE sub template (and have the web design program change all the pages that use that template), then FTP 'em all. Boom. Done.

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@Rick, Re: indexing - tables do not interfere with Search Engine indexing. Neatorama uses tables (and gasp - tables within tables). We're indexed by search engines just fine.

Again, No CSS guru will (or should) say that turning your website from table to CSS will result in better SERP. That's because there are many on-site and off-site factors that go into SERP algo.

In fact, trying too hard in SEO can backfire. (Anyone familiar with OOP?)

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Re: disabled user with screen reader. Actually, I used to correspond with a blind person who reads Neatorama regularly using a screen reader. Never once did he complain about tables. Screen readers read tables perfectly fine.

The largest problem on the web for screen readers are Flash and Ajax websites, not tables.

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@6ixty: So, let me get this straight: A) Table is more intuitive B) older browsers display tables better than CSS but CSS is still better than tables? :)

Re: mobile markets - I've only seen Neatorama on two mobile phones: a side kick and an iPhone. It displayed both fine, but the sheer amount of graphics on the blog really made it unfriendly to mobile phones.

Re: saving in bandwidth - this is something that I often hear when someone tauts the advantages of CSS, but what they don't realize is that the saving of bandwidth really only comes into play if you're a really, really big sites (like ESPN - I read somewhere that they save a TB in bandwidth a month just by converting to CSS). We have a long way to go before we reach that level and when we did, and I can afford it, you betcha I'll hire a CSS-competent web designer (maybe Zach!) to redesign the blog :)

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My final note on this subject, then I'll let other people have the last word:

I'm a practical web designer - meaning I'll use whatever tool that works for me, as long as the end result is the same (and by end result, I mean what you see in the browsers).

Neatorama is built with tables AND CSS. I find that in some cases, CSS works better - and in other cases, tables work better.

Can I force Neatorama to be purely CSS? Yes - I have tried. But it came with one big disadvantage (layout blowing up on accidentally oversized photo) so I used tables instead.

If it were the other way around, then I'd use CSS. :)

@Doctor Slack: You're right - it was ambiguous in the article. I've added a sentence (that the antikythera mechanism was estimated to have been made in 150 BC) that hopefully will explain it better.

@bean: Neatorama gets upwards of 15,000 spam comments daily. Akismet catches 99.99% of these (with a handful of false positives, but what can you do about it). I've added a trip filter that will hopefully get rid of pothead spam.

@Ambrose - you're right. A lot of errors on Neatorama result from trivial stuff like having instead of , which matters in XHTML. I won't pretend I know a lot about why it matters but when websites like Google and Yahoo fail W3 markup validation test, what does that tell you?

@bean - as opposed to what? WordPress is a great blogging platform, and their continued success and growth reflects that.

Now, I'll gleefully join in the fray about tables vs. CSS. As you can tell, I'm on the side of tables - yes, I'm an old school website coder. BUT, I didn't code Neatorama using tables just to be forever living in 1999 - tables make much more sense to me than CSS (I'm talking about positional CSS. Of course it makes sense to use stylesheet to define fonts and such).

No doubt positional CSS has many benefits - but I find that most of them are exaggerated:

1. TRUE: CSS loads faster BUT not that much faster. Your viewer's Internet connection speed matters more than whether he's viewing a CSS or table-layout based website. Moreover, on a website like Neatorama, images and ad serving are the culprits for slow loading. Not because it uses tables.

2. TRUE: CSS allows for smaller file size (hence faster loading time above) BUT not that much smaller. Any savings in file size is trumped by having to store large image files.

3. TRUE: It takes browsers longer to figure out how to display table layouts than CSS BUT that's only with older computers. With today's computer there is no practical difference.

Then there are supposed benefits of CSS that I find completely bunkum:

1. CSS are faster to design

Not if you have to take into account all the different hacks and work-arounds for all the different browsers on the market today.

2. CSS are faster to update, all you have to do is edit the stylesheet.

That's the same with tables. The beauty of dynamic website like this blog is that all I have to do is change one file. Even on a static website, I use templates, which do the same exact thing.

3. CSS give you better SEO result

Not true - not true at all. SERP is determined by many more factors than just position of content in the HTML. Look at high ranking web pages and you'll see that a good number of them use tables, or if they don't they have a lot of javascript in the HTML header, thereby pushing the "content" section further below in the file.

Neatorama ranks pretty well on Google - with no SEO at all. And the blog leaks outlinks like a sieve!

But there are TWO real reason I use tables are because of the particular weaknesses of positional CSS:

1. No standard application of CSS.

What works for one browser doesn't work for another. Why do you think there are so many hacks and work-arounds with CSS? Did it look beautiful in Firefox? Great - but it looks bad in Explorer. How about in Safari? AOL browser?

After you spent hours writing work-arounds for all the browsers, do you ever think about future browsers? What will happen to your website if Microsoft released a new browser that is incompatible with the CSS work-around? It has happened before, you know.

Tables, on the other hand, are rock solid. Every browser displays table the same way.

2. CSS doesn't handle error well.

Neatorama's layout is simple: two fixed column, centered on the page.

Now, what happens when an author uploads an image that is slightly larger than normal for a post?

CSS: The layout blows apart. That single picture will cause the two column to display like two rows on some browsers (interestingly, different browsers will display the error in different ways). I know because I've tried it.

Table: Nothing - the table column it's in just stretches a little bit. The two column layout remains intact.

@Zach: that's great - but my "little wooden bridge" handles much more traffic than most of the blogs/websites in the world. And it's built with tables!

It's not CSS/tables that matter when we get to this point: it's server capabilities and configurations.

It's a typo! Fixed, thanks Hm and Anon.

It's kind of a very old argument, wicky - but yes, I do think tables are better than positional CSS.

Add this to the collection:

Craziest Gadgets by Jeff K.

@Michaelinnotts: yes, the property tax will increase, but it's offset by not having a mortgage (the show pays off the house).

I don't know how they structure the deal so the homeowners don't have to pay higher income tax (maybe the house is "leased" to the show).

BM = bowel movement. Get it now?

"Watch where you put that hand, lady!"

Edie: Let someone else wade in first.
JenDiggity: Thanks! Now eat faster!