Doug Bowman, designer and css guru, published yet another article dedicated to getting those of us who have not gone the “standards-compliant” route on our sites to make the leap.
There’s no longer any reason to use tables for layout, nor is there reason to maintain multiple versions of a site solely for different desktop browsers. Throw the tables out first. Trust us, they’re not needed anymore.
God, how I wish I could believe him.
You see, my company has clients whose customers are instructors found in educational institutions across the country, from Harvard to such-and-so community college. These are often non-technical users - though intelligent and very vocal - at least 3% of which are using some form of Netscape Navigator 4.x.
These users do not want to see something like what you see here, which is Doug’s site rendered in the aforementioned browser, and they are unlikely to be willing - or even permitted - to install a new web browser on their computer just to complete a business transaction with us.
Believe me, I would love to move completely to a standards-compliant layout, brandishing my delete-key like a samurai’s katana, slicing open tables and gutting pages in an honorable fury. But until I can justify to our clients that those 3% of decision-makers don’t count, and that the negative word-of-mouth a crappy-looking site will generate won’t hurt them that much, I’ve got to stick with tables and spacer-gifs.
Any other opinions?
The tech team will be ordering pizza and perhaps watching 
