Use HTML Tables not CSS

I don't know why I'm stepping into this. The arguments in the linked article are in most cases ridiculous, not to mention, poorly written. For starters, the article is hosted on blogger.com and the site is using a template designed by Doug Bowman of stopdesign.com, one of those "web standards activists".

Also, since when is using CSS more expensive than using Table based layout? Last I checked using CSS diminishes bandwidth costs remarkably. That alone is reason for using CSS.

Next, how on earth is table based layout easier to maintain than CSS? Adjusting a Cascading Style Sheet is worlds easier than adjusting an incomprehensible table desgin with all the myriad th, tr strewn hither and yon.

Also, since when is it good practice to just go along using a bad idea just because one joker doesn't want to shape up? Do you honestly believe that IE7 would be in the pipeline if not for the fact that browsers like Firefox and web-standards designers have been embarrasing Microsoft and its poor implementation of standards?

Lastly, I'm an advocate of standards and have never advocated nor used hacks to render my designs.

Oh, and P.S. a table is for making tables; not for laying out images.

Apologies if I sound like a jerk but someone just woke me from a nap and this was the first ridiculous thing I read.

I also know better than start discussions about standards vs. non-standards, microsoft vs. apple, women vs. men, democrats vs. republicas...

But it is so true, CSS is a must and shame on anyone that is not using them.

Why? CSS is a standard, it is not used but most sites, but standards does not mean popular or most used.

Back in 2001 I didn't see much of the greatness of CSS, a little bit to set Fonts, sizes and backgrounds, but then I said, why not give it a full try.... I was hooked after 3 months of really hands-on. It took me a lot, some people may never get it and some people may dream on CSS, but I can not believe how easy is to think in CSS now that I am using them.

Recently i had a freelance work, it took me about three weeks to set the major templates and main page, then, in two days a whole 70,000 pages site had been converted with no problem, and just like that, they required a change of layout and it just took me less than an hour to set the adjustment style and less than a minute to apply it to the whole site. So it is practical.

If you want to be amazed about CSS just go to:

http://www.csszengarden.com

http://www.mezzoblue.com

http://www.alistapart.com

And again, tables are for data, not for graphic layout!

p.s. I agree that you need people that understand it and they may be hard to find, but it is well worth it.

p.s.s. And I know that my current personal site is not CSS based but I am in the process... however, all of my work in the past two years is: http://www.vtrenz.com, http://www.ndsu.edu/prospective_students/

final p.s. It is so ironic that the article was published on a site where they used CSS for the layout ;-P

I had a feeling this would ignite strong feelings ;) My view would be that CSS is great way to separate content and formatting but it doesn't mean it's replaced other methods entirely for a certain scale of site. A table is meant for data not images but the web has grown organically so sometimes elements get used in unintended ways. I like CSS, I'm just not 100% sold on the idea of it being the Holy Grail for site construction. Same with Flash but that's a whole other flame war....

I just don't see how tables can be organic? CSS has always been more fluid to me.

I meant the methods and conventions people used to build websites grew organically. No one set of guidelines was laid down to follow and necessity became the mother of invention.

I have your back Cian. I feel like 98% of the people out there preaching about CSS-P are doing it because all the other nerds out there say it's the way to do it. I do not see anything at all wrong with laying a composition out within tables and driving it 100% through CSS. It is not like future browsers will all together stop rendering tables. Come on people, seriously.

So yeah, "tables are for tubular data", how many times am I going to hear that thoughtless regurgitation. So what! If they work for my sites, and I can get my sites to render correctly acrtoss all the major browsers, and without 20 different hacks, then so be it. As I said, it is not like browsers will ever up and stop rendering tables one day and I finished off my site in less time and with less frustration than trying to be cool and use CSS-P and get things to work in the major browsers.

I am sure all you CSS purists are just griding your teeth right now in disbelief. Until I see some solid advantage, (other than supposed SEO) to bearing through the frustration of a CSS-P layout that actually works without hacks, I will remain convinced that CSS-P layouts are just something people to bitch about.

Sorry for yelling.

table layout
+ it is quicker (if you're not a CSS purist)
+ cross-browser very compatible
+ it is intuitive
- it is messier, especially with table in table in table portal layouts
- fattens the source code
- a table is not rendered in a browser until its whole structure and text content is loaded. im not sure if this is true for all browsers but i know this is true in IE. im sure all of you visited a portal only to stare for minutes at the browser window and the whole portal being rendered at once, at the end of the loading. that's why most of them are now re-made in css.

css layout
+ smaller source sizes
+ re-usable, re-skinnable
+ separates content from layout, making the source a breeze to understand, edit, convert, publish for a different medium
+ has great future, with alpha transparency, rounded corners, etc
- incredible workarounds for browser incompatibilities
- the css box model is far from a good model for laying out lots of graphics.
- requires too many calculations. if u need to enlarge the width of a box by 11px, you need then to go to all other boxes and shrink the size by 11px. it can get very annoying.
- still has its stupid problems for pretty regular layouts that can be easily done with tables
***
I would say I'm in the middle.
I still move faster with tables, but I do all the colors, backgrounds and formating by CSS. CSS has features you should love, like aligning and repeating the background of something where you want it, how you want it. And lots more.

But with pure CSS layout you always have suprises. You have to tweak it by putting borders of different colors to different boxes and keep playing with the numbers. Sometimes things push each other and intersect their neighbours pretty odly depending on parents, containers or other things. It sometimes seems that too many features and posiblities rather slow you down than give you options.

Dunno. Until 2-3 major browsers behave the same with the same CSS source, i wont fully move to that. Until then, Im still trying to learn it and observe its behaviour but I wont risk a deadline for it.

But I do appreciate a clean CSS source or someone who handles that well.

--------------------------------------------------
the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind can never quite understand
why anybody would ever want to get away from them

I've been designing sites since 1995, and I've ALWAYS had to work around browsers, whether I was using tables or, more recently, CSS to layout my sites. I will never go back to using tables for layout, and I find XHTML & CSS much more intuitive to use.

There are so many benefits:

* Search Engine Optimisation is much better with XHTML & CSS.
* The overall page sizes are smaller, so they're quicker to download, and less bandwidth-intensive.
* It's much easier to repurpose a site to work on different formats (ie PDAs, mobile/cell phones, printers etc). No more creating "print only" specific pages...
* Templates are much easier to create, re-use and re-purpose.

I don't get the argument that using tables makes things quicker. It makes things much more complex, fighting with varying cell widths or heights, colspans, rowspans, nesting tables within tables to get the desired effect.

Yes, browsers render things differently, but that's exactly the same as when you use tables. It's a fact of life. Both camps have to deal with it. But I'd urge anyone to get their hands mucky, delve into some XHTML & CSS and see the further opportunities it offers...

Phil

I will lay the card that actually made me learn and use CSS.

People with disabilities. Yes I know that that's not your market usually, but that's the argument that in my company made use realize how we didn't needed any extra code or anything like that for making our content accessible to people with disabilities.

Liek I mentioned before, working for an educational institution or governmental institution in the US now you are required to make content accessible. Policy 508. Using CSS will require nothing more for this to be possible.

Once again, Tables were great in the middle 90's, I had to use them back then, but the solution is here CSS.

Let me do an analogy, back in the 80's and early 90's there was MacPaint (Paint for Win) and the applications still exist today, but do you use that or Photoshop, no that we have the technology?

There would be no web 2.0 without CSS.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

and check this out:
http://web2.0validator.com/

Table borders are so much harder to render than DIV or SPAN borders. They show up the way I want them in IE, but when I wish to show in NETSCAPE/FF/SAFARI, they have that damn shade as default. Yes I can run some fixes and styles, but the extra initial effort with CSS is totally worth it. I am new with full CSS, but I don't think I'll ever go back.

Again, tables' borders are terrible in cross-platform display compared to using SPANs and DIVs.

peace.

ps. i find it INTERESTING that the article is on a table-less designed site. sorry if someone else mentioned this above, I'm a bit lazy at-times.

I agree with you Cian. A combination of tables and CSS is the way to go. If it's easier to achieve a three column layout with a bit of help from tables I think it's perfectly ok to go with it. Also, building the whole site for Firefox without using hacks and than adding the IE bugs as conditional statements is in my opinion the correct and most future proof solution. This way you have a clean and safe code with a separate css file just to fix IE.