Was going to post this in the GD section, but feel it more appropriate in here.
After a bit of advice, ideas, etc regarding an ongoing occurance at work which I've warned about for years and only now is starting to cause problems.
Can I PLEASE ask that the usual 'because this is better than that 'cos that's what I was taught with my PHDmk3 Diploma Degree from Oxford but I've got sod all experience of the real world" arguments are just not simply raised!
Right:
Got a lad here who's worked for the company for 6 years. He's bloody good at his job, does some fantastic artwork and some gorgeous webpage layouts. Customers are really really satisfied with his work, and what's more, can churn out these lovely designs quite quickly.
But he has a problem: He just point blank refuses to use CSS to layout pages and as such a typical webpage can contains literally dozens upon dozens on embedded TABLES, TRs, TDs, etc, etc.
When I come to add my code for forms or what-have-you, it's an absolute NIGHTMARE going through all these tags, and last week spent the past part of 2 days trying to incorporate a simple data grid because the main page had a TD for a 5px graphic, another TD with all sorts of attributes set for it's width/height, several TDs for a shadow, blah blah blah.
Past few weeks however, we're getting more and more, not complaints, but more 'concerns' that customers websites aren't looking good in IE8 and even "Compatibility view" isn't rendering them correctly.
Javascript errors are more abundant now because of the way IE8 handles tables, and even running the pages in Firefox and/or Opera, you can see the cracks and flaws because they've just been designed and laid out in a 100% TABLE within TABLE manner.
I'm trying to find some constructive argument to present my boss as to why our designer should be going down the CSS road, and the designer is literally digging his heels in saying that a TABLE is a TABLE and the browser renders it accordinly, CSS isn't any better it's just a 'prefered' manner.
The only argument I can fully agree with (hence the real world guys here among us will probably relate to) is that he says he just doesn't have time to learn about CSS for layouts, and he can quite easily (and quickly) draw out everything he needs using TABLEs in DreamWeaver, size it all up, fill in the blanks, etc, etc.
But from my point of view, it's taken 2, 3 sometimes 4 times longer to incorporate my code, IE8 and FF are starting to 'complain' about the rendering techniques and the designer is simply applying more and more TDs, TRs, etc to fix these 'visual glitches' making things twice as bad.
And from a customers point of view, sites aren't being shown 100% on a myriad of browsers but the designer is just merryily adding a TR here or expanding a WIDTH there to compensate for all this.
Any thoughts on how I can tackle this?
After a bit of advice, ideas, etc regarding an ongoing occurance at work which I've warned about for years and only now is starting to cause problems.
Can I PLEASE ask that the usual 'because this is better than that 'cos that's what I was taught with my PHDmk3 Diploma Degree from Oxford but I've got sod all experience of the real world" arguments are just not simply raised!
Right:
Got a lad here who's worked for the company for 6 years. He's bloody good at his job, does some fantastic artwork and some gorgeous webpage layouts. Customers are really really satisfied with his work, and what's more, can churn out these lovely designs quite quickly.
But he has a problem: He just point blank refuses to use CSS to layout pages and as such a typical webpage can contains literally dozens upon dozens on embedded TABLES, TRs, TDs, etc, etc.
When I come to add my code for forms or what-have-you, it's an absolute NIGHTMARE going through all these tags, and last week spent the past part of 2 days trying to incorporate a simple data grid because the main page had a TD for a 5px graphic, another TD with all sorts of attributes set for it's width/height, several TDs for a shadow, blah blah blah.
Past few weeks however, we're getting more and more, not complaints, but more 'concerns' that customers websites aren't looking good in IE8 and even "Compatibility view" isn't rendering them correctly.
Javascript errors are more abundant now because of the way IE8 handles tables, and even running the pages in Firefox and/or Opera, you can see the cracks and flaws because they've just been designed and laid out in a 100% TABLE within TABLE manner.
I'm trying to find some constructive argument to present my boss as to why our designer should be going down the CSS road, and the designer is literally digging his heels in saying that a TABLE is a TABLE and the browser renders it accordinly, CSS isn't any better it's just a 'prefered' manner.
The only argument I can fully agree with (hence the real world guys here among us will probably relate to) is that he says he just doesn't have time to learn about CSS for layouts, and he can quite easily (and quickly) draw out everything he needs using TABLEs in DreamWeaver, size it all up, fill in the blanks, etc, etc.
But from my point of view, it's taken 2, 3 sometimes 4 times longer to incorporate my code, IE8 and FF are starting to 'complain' about the rendering techniques and the designer is simply applying more and more TDs, TRs, etc to fix these 'visual glitches' making things twice as bad.
And from a customers point of view, sites aren't being shown 100% on a myriad of browsers but the designer is just merryily adding a TR here or expanding a WIDTH there to compensate for all this.
Any thoughts on how I can tackle this?
