…or maybe Cascading Style Sheets, if it pleases y'all. You see, the last time I poked my head [impolitely] behind a web page and [politely] inside web design forums was way back in the 1999-2000 period and - from what I 'heard' - I figured this CSS business was not going to catch on.

And when I drop by for another peek recently, I see CSS has become one of the hottest things in web design! And that too when I just finished designing this website using the good old traditional stuff…

Dang!

But ever ready to join technology in its march towards a more accessible Internet, I bow before the new breed of web designers - the Cascading Crusaders and the Style Sheet Stylists, who snicker every time someone says the word "table".

Yeah, yeah — we all know what this CSS business is. Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] is a language used to describe or format the presentation of a web page that lets you neatly separate content from presentation [colours, layouts etc.].

If you want to have your online presence accessible to them cellular phones and other hi-tech devices [and avoid being perceived as a leftover from the Jurassic era], you have to embrace CSS, as it facilitates displaying content on such gadgets. There's more — in the tough, competitive World Wide Web, the battle to improve search engine ranking never ends. And search engines search better if the text is free of cumbersome HTML tags. So one more point to CSS.

Also, designers and Internet users can now dynamically alter the look of a website simply by clicking a button that 'tells' the page/site to use a different CSS file with a different set of presentation options. Sceptical? Step this way for the well-known CSSzengarden site. Click on a couple of design presets [from the Select a Design box on the side] and see what CSS can do.

There's more. Fancy animation and rocking soundtracks mean zilch to me if I suffer from visual or aural disabilities. CSS is not elitist - content with CSS formatting can be accessed by special output devices [such as Braille readers and speech synthesizers], which, otherwise can be hampered by HTML-formatted content.

Traditionally, HTML-only pages use tables to present content. Images and text are displayed using tables [There! Didn't you hear someone snicker?] and cells of varying width and height. This kind of formatting makes it quite impossible to separate content from presentation and is thus somewhat inflexible and rigid, besides making major design overhauls seem like a nightmare that'd give even Wes Craven nightmares.

But what to do with the millions of pages with HTML-only formatting already online? How do you acquire that Forward Compliance? Re-code whole sites from scratch? Man, that could take forever AND an eternity!

And so ladies and gents, put your palms together for Mr. Vesselin Atanasov - the software developer who has been toiling hard so YOU don't have to in your new mission [should you choose to accept it] to free the Internet of rigid tables.

Mr. Atanasov has developed a handy tool called Table2CSS, which may just be exactly what the doctor ordered. But let's hear it from the gent himself.

"In 2006," he says, "a couple of clients wanted us to convert their websites to table-less layouts. Obviously, a manual conversion wasn't feasible - so I wrote a simple PHP script to replace the table tags with DIV elements and ran the resulting file through HTML Tidy. Driven by the positive results, I continued adjusting the script and using it to convert pages to table-less layouts."

The result - Table2CSS - has been available as a commercial application from summer of 2007. Based on customer requests it has been rewritten as real C++ desktop app a few months ago, he adds.

And the users are happy. "We're getting lots of feedback for Table2CSS, mostly suggestions for new features. In fact, the development of Table2CSS for the last half year has been driven by user feedback alone! And of course, after the release of a new upgrade it is nice to see Thank You letters from existing customers," he says.

From the screenshot, you'll notice that the app is fairly easy to work with. But we'll let Mr. Atanasov explain how the app works.