The CSS Holy War

I'm not sure which is more striking, the fact that people are still posting comments on my CSS article, or the degree to which the discussion has come to resemble a religious one. Computer programmers talk about having religious wars about programming languages, but the term is usually understood to be at least partially tongue-in-cheek. I used to think that no one really got religious about these things. Now I'm becoming less sure.

I was really hoping to leave this topic behind but a comment posted today by someone who calls himself Pherdnut just pushed me over the edge. I happen to have a free hour between meetings, so against my better judgement I'm going to take this on yet again.

Pherdnut writes:

This would have been a better argument if:

What you suggest is impossible wasn't possible.

I never suggested anything was impossible. Go look it up. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Did you find the word "impossible"? No, you did not, because it isn't there. What is there is an explicit acknowledgement that all these things are possible:

Of course, all of these things can be fixed. But the point is they have to be fixed!
...
It [creating a three-column layout that doesn't have one of the many problems I cited] may be possible. I don't have a mathematical proof that it's not.

The problem with CSS is not that it makes it impossible to do the things people want to do. The problem with CSS is that it makes it hard. There is nothing inherently flawed about the CSS approach. The problem is in the execution.

But I don't want to talk about CSS. I want to talk about the tenor of the discussion. Consider this comment:

I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS...

I have not read CSS Mastery. I have read a lot of other material about CSS though, including several books, a boatload of web pages, and even some of the original source material. Does it matter that I have not read CSS Mastery? Pherdnut thinks so.

It's by Eric Meyer.

Well, actually, no, it isn't. CSS Mastery is by Andy Budd. Eric Meyer wrote a book called "CSS: The Definitive Guide."

I can assure that he knows a lot more CSS than whoever hacked together those tutorials you linked to.

How can I trust your assurances when you can't even get the most basic facts straight?

(UPDATE: I made an inadvertent but crucial edit in the above exchange. Pherdnut's full quote was, "I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS and also the CSS pocket reference which very quickly gets to the point when it comes to the specifics of how things are rendered (or supposed to be rendered) by the browsers. It's by Eric Meyer." The CSS pocket reference is indeed by Eric Meyer. This was simply an oversight on my part. I just missed the second reference, and thought the whole passage was talking about one book. I regret the error, but I stand by the substance of this post.)

But the question I want to ask is not whether or not "CSS Mastery" or "CSS: The Definitive Guide" or any of the other 41,803 results from an Amazon book search for "CSS" is a higher quality source of information about CSS than any of the sources I've actually relied on to date. The question I want to ask is: how is someone who doesn't know CSS supposed to know? Let us suppose for the moment that everything I've read about CSS (including the original source material from the W3C) is crap, and only Eric Meyer (or is it Andy Budd?) can show me the One True CSS Way. How fortunate it is that Pherdnut came along to set me right! What would I have done without him? Among the over 1000 comments that this post has generated in various venues, not a single person suggested either book before now. If not for Pherdnut, I might never have seen the light.

I submit that that in an of itself is a problem. But that's not what I want to talk about either. What I want to talk about is the form of the argument, which is something along the lines of, "Your conclusions about CSS are wrong because you do not have the necessary information."

On its face this doesn't seem altogether unreasonable, but in fact it is a very problematic argument. How much information is enough, and how can you tell? Suppose I read Meyer and I still believed that on balance tables ought to be used for layout. What then? Would someone else come along and say, "Oh, don't listen to that Pherdnut character, he's a moron, and so is Meyer. The person you really want to read is Arglebargle. He'll set you straight."

Notice how similar in structure this line of reasoning is to a truly religious argument: God doesn't answer your prayers? That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, it just shows that you don't have enough faith, or haven't read the proper holy text. Maybe if you believed just a little harder next time...

Such arguments can never be answered, because there's no way to prove that you've attained a level of faith/knowledge that would falsify the hypothesis. No amount of unanswered prayers will ever disprove the existence of God to a true believer. Likewise, no demonstration of difficulty will ever convince the CSS true believer that there's a problem. The cause will always lie in the person experiencing the problem because there will always be some book he hasn't read or some technique or hack he hasn't mastered.

I think the reason that my original CSS rant got so much attention is not necessarily because I'm right but because I introduced some actual facts into the discussion, and nothing is more threatening to the true believer than facts. Notably, that claim is a hypothesis that can be tested by introducing some more facts into the discussion and observing the responses. Let's give it a try, shall we? Here are some more facts:

1. It has been claimed by the CSS true believers that using tables for layout is bad for SEO. You would think that if this were true, Google would say so on their webmaster guidelines, but they don't. In fact, the only reference to CSS and tables that I could find on Google is this entry from the Google blog:

If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.

The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.

Note that this is not an admonition against tables, it's an admonition against deeply nested tables, which is an admonition that I thoroughly endorse.

There's another bit of evidence that the tables-destroy-SEO argument is bogus, and that is that if it were true there would be an absolutely trivial fix that Google could implement: simply standardize a class identifier that indicates that a table is being used for layout, e.g.:


<table class=for_layout_only>...


I submit that the reason they don't do this is because there isn't actually a problem to be solved.

2. A second claim made by the CSS true believers is that tables make a site inaccessible. But the W3C's own guidelines on accessibility say nothing about this, nor do the W3C recommendations on the use of tables have any mention of this. To the contrary, the latter page provides a few specific recommendations on how to make tables accessible to non-visual user agents.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough to convince you that the W3C doesn't agree with the CSS fanatics, check out their quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There you will find a whole pile of recommendations on how to make web sites accessible, including specific recommendations for using tables. There's also this:

Using CSS rather than tables for page layout (future link)

You'd think that if tables were so inherently awful the W3C would have given this item more attention.

You can actually test the effect of tables on accessibility yourself. There are publicly accessible screen readers out there. Pick one and run a table through it and you can see for yourself how bad the "problem" really is.

Let the experiment begin.