I Code in Tables ⇾
Christian Ross has a confession: he codes in tables.
First off, let’s get this out of the way, clients don’t care. If it shows up well on their screen and is close in all of the major browsers, they’re happy. It doesn’t matter to them if their site can pass the W3C Validator.
Of course, not always. Only if the circumstances dictate that this is the best approach for his clients.
And yet, he’s worried that including this work in his portfolio has potentially lost him some work. One only has to look at the excellent design of his personal site to know that he has talent. If that is the case, I’d say he’s better off not having got the jobs — an employer that is not willing to dig a little probably would not be all that enjoyable to work for.
Sebastiaan de With makes some interesting points in favor of Flash. He includes the logic that if your implementation that does not use Flash equates to poor performance, then perhaps a future without Flash does not necessarily equate with progress.
Take a look at the current Macheist page. At the time of this writing, it is using 65 to 70 percent of the processing power in my early 2008 Mac Pro, equipped with eight Xeon cores.
Sometimes it’s easy to don the standards hat and inelegantly state, “Thou shalt never use Flash.” But if Flash is a better solution than all other options, use it. The same goes for tables — there is a time and place. The Machest sites are a good example of this.
Dan Mall said it well in his latest piece on A List Apart titled Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web:
Create something excellent where the technology is transparent, and allow only the curious to look under the hood to actually see what’s going on. JavaScript, Flash, HTML5, tables, Shockwave, Unity—no one cares when people using it can do what they’re supposed to.
Hear, hear.
