There is something special about writing a delicately crafted, finely tuned, beautiful web page written in pure clean HTML and CSS.  No tables, no javascript adjustments, no hacks (okay, limited hacks).  It feels so fufilling when you have finally done it!  You check browser after browser almost in disbelief as you see it is consistent in each one.  And then you finally look over your code once more, admiring the clever divs, ids, and classes... all neatly nested in a way that makes contextual sense and just FLOWS!  Isn't it great?!?

Once that moment comes you tend to forget the hours of toil and frustration.  The untold number of curse words you uttered.  How you wished horrible things upon Bill Gates.  And of course that office equipment that was a casualty of your rage.  Once you have achieved that "CSS Zen" you forget that time is money and how much you threw away trying to achieve it.

I think I may have finally realized this and had enough.  Screw trying to develop "correctly" just because it makes you a good developer.  I'm sick of "the coding gods" telling me that using tables for layout is a sin.  Truth is, if I had just used tables to begin with I could have spent probably literally 2% of the time to get the layout to work... and who would really care or know the difference?  Not my users!

Even when I think I have achieved near CSS Zen, it never fails that some Internet Explorer 6 user is going to email me and tell me something is still broken.  It still doesn't look great on mobile phones.  And you know what?  Even with the harmonious CSS, when I do a major site redesign it's never as easy as you think it will be to get the layout to fit the new template.  You still always have to go back and change the HTML anyway.  It's never easy, it's always painful.

So I think I'm done with bothering to be a "good web developer"... instead I am going to focus on being a productive web developer.  Tables... let's be friends again!