Creating a new website, layout with tables or layers??

Constructing a new website, and cant deside if I should use tables or layers to make the layout...

I have a menu on the website that must be positioned with px. With layers I can control the exact position of the other elements, so why should I even think of tables? One thing that comes in mind is the easy way to just set the align center of the table and the web site will be in the middle of the page with no regarding of resulotion or window size... But this also makes problems when positioning the menu that must be set with px....

Give me any feedback with up and downs you have exprienced with layers and tables....

/Smirre

Ideally with web accessability standards in mind you should use layers but they can be difficult to use when you are designing the site to be cross browser compatible (sometimes needing a separate style sheet for each browser). Really only data should be displayed in tables but they used to be the main way people laid out their pages.

More info about the w3c wai -> http://www.w3.org/WAI/
or you can look at http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp which has a script validator as well.

It really depends on who your audience will be.

Hope that helps.

DJ

Thanks for your input.

Anyone else have any input??

I think I prefer using layers myslef, but always good to here other opions.

The end users mostly uses IE, some netscape. And that means at least two stylesheets. I will have to download opera to check if a stylesheet for that browser is also needed.

Anyone have some input what will be diffrent on mac and unix machines as I'm a true windows user....

/Smirre

CSS > Tables

Quote:

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Originally posted by dj4uk
Ideally with web accessability standards in mind you should use layers but they can be difficult to use when you are designing the site to be cross browser compatible (sometimes needing a separate style sheet for each browser). Really only data should be displayed in tables but they used to be the main way people laid out their pages.

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Only horrible browsers with horrible rendering engines are hard to develop for, and the worst rendering engine out there currently is IE.

As long as you code it correctly and your code validates, you will have a MUCH better chance of it displaying correctly (and it usually does, escept for the fact that IE's CSS2 ability is almost non-existant).

You should have no problem creating a layout with CSS and having it look correctly accross browsers. Worst case thing is you'll need a seperate stylesheet for IE, since mozilla and Opera both have fairly good rendering engines, you can just make 1 CSS for IE and another for any others

Be very careful when using tables inside of a table as they tend to reset themselves in earlier types of Internet Explorer and sometimes even appear to be blank or you get a crappy error saying CANNOT LOAD PAGE INSIDE A TABLE FRAME.;)