Simon Willison’s Weblog

Lockergnome reverts

I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were probably just going to move to a transitional tables/CSS combination design with tables used to bypass some of the more taxing cross-browser issues. I think the following code snippet from their new front page speaks for itself:

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="778" 
bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tr><td align="left">
<div id="footer">
  <blockquote>&copy; 1996-2004, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All 
  Rights Reserved. Please read our <a href="/about/privacy-policy.phtml">
  Privacy Policy</a> and <a href="/about/terms-of-service.phtml">
  Terms of Service</a>. Web site hosted by 
  <a href="http://www.webair.com/cgi-bin/in?51">Webair</a>. 
  Email newsletters powered by <a href="http://www.whatcounts.com/">WhatCounts</a>. 
  Domain registered at <a href="https://www.gnomedomains.com/">GnomeDOMAINS</a>.
</blockquote>
</div>
</td></tr></table>

A blockquote for indentation, inside a table that exists purely to apply a width, following on from two empty paragraphs for added vertical space? It’s like CSS margin properties never happened. Welcome back to 1996.