Pretend you’re me for a second. You’ve just come off a job where you pulled together a fantastic (ultimately award winning) large scale website redesign project, css based layout, standards compliant, the works (www.bowdoin.edu). You’re proud of your accomplishment and gratified at the recognition you get. You take a new job and quickly discover that the folks at your new job are clueless about css. They argue against the box model on the grounds that it’s too hard to make it work across browsers (translation – they don’t know how to do it, thus it’s too hard), they lay everything out in uber-complicated tables, and they pull shit like putting a call to the same stylesheet multiple times in a single html file because they use dreamweaver and they want their files to correctly appear in wysisyg even when they’re only working on a section of a page. In short, they’re best practices website design retarded. What would you do?

If you’re me, you’d go to battle with these folks by collecting as much data as you can to refute their position, which is what I’m in the midst of doing. Today I found a really great presentation that was given at Seybold San Fran years ago called why tables for layout is stupid (which is, by the way, 3 years old, hopefully serving to further make my point with the folks still stuck in a table-based layout world). Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar position my bet is you’ll find this useful in your discussion with the powers that be. And if you have other handy resources along these lines, please pass them along in the comments below.

(There’s also a great slide in a another presentation from the same timeframe demonstrating the scale of savings one can achieve by moving to CSS just on a bandwidth basis, which they demonstrate by looking at what happened with a redesign on the ESPN site. Check it out – this more than anything seems my most likely leverage point, I’m going to try to use it in a conversation with the CFO).