html. Home. 1. 2) Faster Load Times Because of Lighter Code I remember load times being a major issue when I first got started but it doesnt seem to be the case anymore with so few people on dialup. Maybe Ill have to write a post on styling tables. If youre not creating HTML e-mails, or unless you have some overriding need to have part of your page scale because of the amount of content on other parts of your page, theres no reason to use tables for layout. The web developers need to test for compatibility, running the program across multiple browsers. Its usually one or two things that may cause a problem and those problems are easily fixed. I dont want to use tables but Im finding it harder and harder to justify not using them. The limit isnt the language, its your current skill level in using the language. The rest is a necessary evil to get the design into the medium. You cant pluck a single cell out of a table and move it somewhere else in the layout. But I guess when all you have lying around is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail. Perhaps this is the reason this debate keeps going on, because this change doesnt look like progress to a lot of people and they feel the benefits dont really outweigh the intuitive design of tables that make design a lot easier for beginners. And all of this is absolutely hilarious when you attempt to make it work in multiple versions of IE and every other browser, let alone on an iPad or iPhone. To compare we really need to look at sites that are well developed on both sites. In my scenario, I flip the first and second td elements in a .Net master page. I dont think using css for a layout means the page automatically ranks better. Many people are able to build sites using css as a layout and getting them to work cross-browser including IE without any difficulty. Artificial intelligence design advantages: How can AI help to design? It helps to form spontaneous and consistent changes. So, its important to ensure faster speed. Tables should be used when a bunch of blocks need to depend on each other, like maintain the same height, or to cooperate in filling their parents width. Make your table markup as simple as possible, and keep things flexible, e.g. All indications are the speed thing is a minor part of Googles algorithm at the moment. 3) SEO From what I can tell, search engines arent indexing or ranking CSS layouts higher than table layouts. I agree with you about seo. Ill reserve judgment on maintenance but I have a hunch Ill be able to go in and make the same changes equally as quickly whether I start with the div or table test pages. Im not disagreeing with anything you say. As people combat these myths the debate goes on and on combating misinformation while dancing around the central issue. I am in the middle of a major project that we tried to code with proper CSS, but its incredibly frustrating and time consuming. Youll compare each of the arguments against another based on relevant data. No technique is designed to be used in isolation. If youre having to spend the vast majority of your time finding workarounds for IE then youve probably been doing something wrong. Youre welcome to use them to layout sites if you want. You can definitely hire someone to create a template for the site if you want. Granted its not the kind of change youre likely to make, but as an example it shows the greater flexibility and control you have in developing with divs. When I first started learning css I did run into problems making things work cross browser. One of the debates that never seems to go away in the web development community is that of css vs tables and which is better to use for the layout of your site. Divs are more flexible. When you ask about table type content with css do you mean using css to show tabular data or are you asking more about how to style tables? As I see it, table layouts have precisely two advantages: 1. Really? However there are other methods to abstract changes that need to be applied to more then one file into a single file. plays an important role, by using CSS you simply got to specify a repeated style for element once & use it That should tell you something. How to Turn a Design Image Into a Working Web Page: Part 1, How to Turn a Design Image Into a Working Web Page: Part 2. I do think there is an advantage for div based techniques for high traffic sites and I will continue to expand my knowledge of div based layouts for this reason. Im sure there are a few out there already, but one more wont hurt. Web designers who take the time to learn css dont have the same problems youre seeing. I agree to an extent but I have here 2 very good reasons why tables are definately worse for SEO: 1. Back in 2003, I gave my presentation, Why tables for layout is stupid, at Seybold (http://blog.hotdesign.com/2008/10/what-is-css/) about the advantages of CSS layouts. Space on the server for all of my clients sites is generally 1/16 of capacity. Thanks for this. Ive been doing web design since the beginning of the internet as a hobby and now professionally and I like a combination of both worlds. Ive been coding on and off since the mid 90s and have been hearing about tables are only for tabular data blah blah blah for years. This is simply not a point I am willing to debate. I also dont have an issue if you want to use them to display a list of links in a menu. For me this debate is less css vs tables as it is divs vs tables. 2. If your visitors are using IE you need to support IE and whether its the code or the browser that gets things wrong is irrelevant. 2. It is less complex therefore the effort are significantly reduced. And then discover that I forgot a somewhere and nothing lines up with the adjacent cells. I will need to learn more about how to use cssdiv to do a page layout. I understand people have old code and sometimes they just need to fix it. We all came to web design in our own way and with our own skills. Maybe I just havent searched the web enough. Can you recommend several online tutorials on how to lay out a web page with divs, as well as with their accompanying css rule elements? This can be very expensive. I also kept all my university textbooks just in case I would need them guess what? I came to web design by way of VB. Ive worked with both, though certainly more with css sites. It might not be that one line of css is off, but more that the way that part of the page is structured in general could be done differently. I dont, however agree that the only way to make things work for IE is tables or even that its easier. Hopefully I can clear up a few things in this post and let you make your own decision. (Yes, I like clean code too.) I hope that helps answer some of the questions. Tables seem, at least to me, to be much more intuitive. I have no great love for code. Regarding Google using load times, does that mean that if your server is on a lower bandwidth connection, or on a slower server that Google will hold that against you, or do they have a way of disregarding those variables and just base it on how long each page would take to load if bandwidth, lag and server response were constant? As for the I dont need any extra code to get stuff to work for ie when using divs and css, really is that so? By the way sorry the code in your comment didnt display. As you can see I still strongly favor css layouts, but I think many of the arguments on either side of the debate get a little silly at times. In its simplest form were comparing: Even in the simplest case above you can see tables are already a more complex structure than divs. The same rules apply: only a situation where not using tables for layout damages the users experience will absolutely qualify It can be used in a wide range of applications. It sounds like youre using tables the same way Im suggesting is fine. However, the industry moved on from them a long time ago. The resulting code runs issue free cross browser. 1. Nice post. I also believe the opposite, theres no point using table rendering if you DO want them to be independent. should be collapsed into a single border: If you only want a border around the table, only specify the border property for If I throw out a website which has no padding or un symetrial or miss-aligned text I would be asked to start over. And yes it is true that you dont much need extra code to get things to work for IE. By the way I forgot to mention it when I commented on your post, but I did enjoy reading it. Table layout; Multiple-column layout; Each technique has its uses, advantages, and disadvantages. CSS or cascading sheet may be a text-based coding language that specifies the website formats and the way a site communicates with web browsers. If I had stopped my study on the first day the table would have won by an equally small margin. I avoid tables and table-cell in almost all layouts to avoid ridicule, but deep down I truly believe that anything else is convoluted and meant to create more jobs for web developers. As networks improve the speed advantage becomes less meaningful and for a small site its not going to be a big deal either. There are plenty of easy ways to create equal height columns in css. Why css layout over table layout? Newspapers have figured out this ideal layout a long time ago, and have thus named their writers columnists. Good Article and a lot of gold in these comments. No technique is designed to be used in isolation. It is in lists of links in one column and descriptions in another column, with more data in a third or forth column. Also if you include the wrapper tags and the like you tend to end up with more tags for css than tables beause of all the work arounds you have to do. I dont use DreamWeaver and you dont need to add fixed dimensions everywhere to make divs work. Very informative article and I hope that it gains some traction so people will stop using so many tables for layout. Learning at write CSS layouts can be tricky, especially if you become familiar with usage tables, but here's why CSS is your best programming bet. CSS (divs) is hard to learn Simply not true. Once a again, thank you for the info! Columns of equal height? Ive been studying the Eric Meyer CSS books, so I am picking up CSS quickly. Your layout is really one thats pretty easy to code. 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