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Simon Willison’s Weblog

On CSS Remakes

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but Paul Hammond’s open letter to “tableless” recoders caused quite a stir a few weeks back with its extensive list of reasons that recoding someone else’s site in CSS helps no one and can in fact have a negative affect on the CSS advocacy effort (the response to the article is summarised in his follow up post).

A year ago I would have strongly disagreed with him—the question then was whether or not CSS was even capable of creating complex layouts, and CSS redesigns were a valuable demonstration of how much could be achieved without tables. I am unsure if that argument has been won yet—there still exist legions of web developers who think CSS is a useful trick for turning off the underlines on links—but the body of evidence seems great enough now that this no longer counts as a valid reason for creating tableless remakes. Paul’s main arguments rest on etiquette (it’s rude to dismiss someone’s work by recreating it), and it’s hard to disagree with him there.

That said, I remain a huge fan of tableless recoding as a tool for education. I myself have a collection of over a dozen recreations of existing sites in CSS, the majority of which I have never publicised and have no intention of doing so. While I was learning CSS (and I doubt you can truly ever finish learning it) I used to recode existing sites at a rate of one or two a week, targetting sites with designs that looked particularly well suited to tables. I learnt a great deal doing this, and I would recommend it to anyone still getting to grips with CSS positioning.

Paul is right that publishing CSS remakes of existing sites with no good reason is no longer appropriate, but as a tool for education this activity should not be under-estimated.

Posted 4th October 2003 at 11:56 pm

This is On CSS Remakes by Simon Willison, posted on 4th October 2003.

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9 comments

  1. I’m with Paul on this. Learning by rebuilding is a great practice and shouldn’t be discouraged — but when it comes to publishing, there’s a fine line.

    If you’re in a French class and someone comes along and does all your homework after hearing your first ‘par-lehz vooz frank-aiz’, you’re not liable to learn much are you?

    Inflicting an author with the ‘proper’ way they should have built their site is saying “Look, you haven’t figured it out yet, you’d best just… hey, no, don’t do… oh, forget it. Just give me the source and stay back.”

    Dave S. - 5th October 2003 06:52 - #

  2. I think that's what I was trying to say, in a very roundabout way (hey, it was nearly midnight!).

    Simon Willison - 5th October 2003 10:15 - #

  3. I think the 'polite' way of doing this would be to :-

    1. Take a table layout as a challenge.
    2. Convert it to a CSS Layout (is possible)
    3. Extract the 'difficult' parts of the design
    4. Abstract those parts into minimal html/css
    5. Document them, referring to the original website as the real life example

    This way people can :-

    1. learn the key area that you've 'solved' in concise a way as possible
    2. bookmark the page for future reference
    3. try to propose more elegent ways of solving, if any

    Thereby :-

    1. Contributing to the pool of knowledge
    2. Promoting community extension
    3. Not pissing off the original authors

    Just my tuppence

    Tim Parkin - 5th October 2003 10:47 - #

  4. I've often wished there was a site that you could voluntarily submit designs to be redesgined by the css brilliant.. while I understand it, and work with it fairly often, there are definitely sites and designs I havent managed to redesign into css, and would actually ENJOY having someone do and explain.

    Casual googling hasn't found any such sites.. anyone know of any?

    Patrick Smallwood - 5th October 2003 15:39 - #

  5. Simon: "publishing CSS remakes of existing sites with no good reason is no longer appropriate"

    Doh!! Why didn't anyone tell me this earlier?!? ;)

    MikeyC - 5th October 2003 18:29 - #

  6. I think Paul was very upset about people doing unsolicited css redesigns. It doesn't really cost anything for a would-be "re-coder" to send an email to the original author, just to let him know of his plans. But sometimes it just feels too good to go play with the code and finish the layout. :)

    markku - 5th October 2003 19:38 - #

  7. As was previously stated it depends upon how the CSS redesign is approached, if done purely for educational purpose then it's not as damaging as inferring that a web designer whom is exclusively using tables for layout is a Neanderthal.

    Robert Wellock - 6th October 2003 14:18 - #

  8. Thank you, MikeyC!

    I’m still laughing … AbuseIt, indeed.

    Michael - 6th October 2003 20:35 - #

  9. Oh go on, show us some of your redesigns. We won't tell anybody. Honest :-)

    Andy Budd - 7th October 2003 14:35 - #

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