Today I had an interesting debate with a developer regarding which is superior using tables or CSS. The particular website we were reviewing uses both, DIVs and tables, however the main structure/container is a table, with DIVs within. It has been known that developing websites with DIVs rather than tables creates a much faster load time, more SEO friendly, and is more 508 compliant. These are all somewhat true to a certain extent. Each website is subjective to how it is built, how many graphics are present, and how much data is involved. Also if your web sever is generally slow or you have to many users for how much bandwidth you have, will make a difference as well. I personally prefer to develop with CSS now, however there are several websites I update that still contain tables. The one nice thing about developing with CSS is that once you get your general structure down, you can easily change the look of your website in some cases without even touching the PHP, HTML, or ASP file you are working on. How is this so? The CSS file that is linked to your wesbite provides all of the styling, size, and looks. You can easily change the parameters of this CSS file with different graphics. CSS Zen Garden s a great reference for this. So, when are you going to say, hey look Mom, no more tables?
Tags: cascading style sheets, CSS, no tables, web design, web development
The one that continues using tables is because it does not dominate or does not know CSS. To design in CSS is far better, by the subject of order, maintenance, accessibility, navigability and thousand reasons more.