Use of Tables, good or bad ?

[Sachiel]

It?s becoming clear that restricting the use of tables brings many advantages, including the following:

+ Cleaner, more streamlined pages, which are easier to manage

+ Improvement of support for multiple user agents and device types including mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs.

+ Improved accessibility for those with physical impairments

+ Reduction of page weight by an average of 50 percent, resulting in faster
download times and economic savings in bandwidth and storage.

What do you think ?

 

[dotcomguy]

These are all very attractive advantages, but if you?re not using tables, how do you lay out your Web sites?

 

[Sachiel]

If you can use all CSS-based layouts, you should. If you have to support browsers that have partial, imperfect, or nonexistent CSS support, use tables if you have to. Then, supplement with CSS where you can.The use of tables with some CSS for layout purposes is referred to as transitional design and is a very good option for those designers who have to support diverse browsers. If you do choose this option, follow these guidelines for best results:
+ Reduce the number of nested tables as much as possible.
+ Reduce the number of table rows.
+ Reduce the number of table cells.

 

[eleven]

CSS is the way to go:

here is a couple of good CSS tutorials to get beginners started the transition from tables to CCS layout

http://www.w3schools.com/css/
http://www.chauy.com/2005/11/introduction-to-css/
http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/
http://www.htmldog.com/

 

[cpengineer]

These are all very attractive advantages, but if you?re not using tables, how do you lay out your Web sites?

By providing different CSSs for various situations, the web page is reformatted automatically to suit the browser or printer. On sites with many pages, for example, it is much faster to change a CSS than to change all of the individual pages and to find and fix markup errors.

 

[peter phillips]

Tables is probably the easiest and quickest way. CSS allows more flexibility in design while tables are designed to display data in an ordered way. Sites designed with the help of Table based CSS are not browser dependent while the sites designed with PURE CSS are browser dependent, If you design your site with PURE CSS it may work in some browsers and it may not work in some for eg. it may work in Internet Explorer but you may not see same results in Mozilla Firefox.

 

[kiz9999]

basically the whole reason that css was invented was to eliminate the use of tables.

 

[peter phillips]

But use of tables has its own advantage. One advantage of using tables is you always get the browser output you want, which in case of pure CSS may vary.

 

[siteseer]

i usually toss in a table in the index marker page. It's a lot cleaner than composing from scratch. maybe some index page templates with tables in them...hmmmn.

 

[imported_sam]

css

Tables is probably the easiest and quickest way.

I found that in time I got faster working with css based design.

 

[digitalvisi]

I use table & CSS (combine them), I found that if I use CSS only, some of my design might not be applied as it has to be especially in asimetric design. So in my opinion combining both is the best choise.

 

[imported_Gareth]

I don't use tables no more, I used to....but then I found the wonderful world of css

Best to use divs' to construct your layout.

 

[Dediwebhost.com]

I agree with Gareth but it will take a while until every website incorporates CSS into their sites.

 

[Corey Bryant]

We primarily use CSS for all the layout and HTML for the content. It helps when the layout needs to be changed - you usualy need to only change one page and it is done.

 

[webhostingrebat]

I definitely agree. I use CSS extensively on my sites because I can change to look and feel of my entire site by editing just one file.

 

[FastNext]

As I know CSS was designed to separate the structure of site from its design. CSS seems to be more convenient for creating sites structure and economizez pages space. But of course some times it is more handy to use tables, to say nothing about "real" tables as grafical representation of information.

 

[mikem]

Some data is simply meant to be displayed in a table. I see no reason to hack together a table like design using css if there's no need to. To say tables should never be used is unjust as there are many places where tables make more sense. An example would be displaying a multiplication table.

 

[watchdoghosting]

Re: css

I still design in tables, but I'm not the most keen in CSS. I can do basic CSS for fonts and width, but when it comes to layout I haven't really schooled myself in it yet.

I know that CSS is the better and more efficient route to take, but sometimes throwing up some tables in Dreamweaver is a lot easier when you have a customer on a low budget.