Well, I finished the prototype that I was doing on tableless design and confirmed the results mentioned in in the stopdesign article on CSS.

The final result was a 65% reduction using CSS and XHTML, only using tables for tabular type data (and one set of form elements). Most of these space savings were in table code and redundant font and formatting information throughout the original HTML (including the non-standard <SPACER> tag, which was sprinkled liberally throughout the markup).

That’s pretty impressive and a real motivator to convert to tableless design. I can’t express enough how cool it is to see the formatting completely decoupled from the standards compliant XHTML!

While part of me wants to post up the results, I’m not going to, as I don’t want to establish a connection between this site and the company that I work for. I’d rather keep them separate. However, the savings in both maintenance and space savings are there. You’ll have to trust me.

Along with the book that I had mentioned in previous articles, I also picked up Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition, put out by O’Reilly. This book was extremely helpful in getting this project done.

On other fronts, I’ve been doing some really interesting reading over the past 4 weeks or so. Two books called The Innovator’s Dilemma and its sequel, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, both by Clayton M. Christiansen. These are really interesting books about how disruption and innovation actually causes established companies to lose their foothold on their markets even though they are making perfectly sound management judgements given where their companies are.

As I get my head around the concepts in these books more, I’ll be posting in depth on them. I just have to figure out how to express what I’ve learned. There’s a lot of information in these books and they are really engaging.