Will Table Designs Die out and will CSS div lightweight designs take it over. Because Ive started learning DIV design and am wondering wether its still ok to practice my table skills or if I should try to keep focusing with divs and forget about table designing?
use of tables has already reduced, css will surely will take over, you can work on table and css both. new technlogies are really gonna keep coming , keep updated
As CSS gets a much more browser compatible website it does make sense to just use CSS instead of tables. Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that in XHTML you can only use tables to display data, as in statistics and that type of thing, due to XML's influence. Though that may be totally wrong! Diarmuid
Tables designs are already dead, but the table tag is not. Tables should still be used to hold tabular data.
I was wondering this as well. Thansk for the answers guys. Good to know. I need to brush up on my css skeelz!!
yes to me tables are dead too! everyone is looking for CSS and overall Web 2.0 technologies today! as luckybee said table design is already dead but yet there is the table tag! and beside that CSS has more features that you can use and if you want a good design and functioning site you have to use css with your tables design too so why not make it all CSS?!
<table> is a html element, just like <div>, <li>, <body> and <h1> are. Table designs are going out, but the table tag will remain to display tabular data, naturally.
I think we, as designers, are being a bit optimistic about this. Tables won't stop being used in layouts for a very long time to come. The thing that will decide when tables stop being used is when automated design software like MS frontpage start using CSS in a way that is readilly accessible, and effective. That isn't likely to happen until MS browsers become more standards compliant which could be a very long time indeed.
of course, tables will always be use as, well tables since thats what they were originally intended for.
I could just drag Tommy Olsson in here, but I'll save him the trouble. You do NOT need to use CSS to get XHTML to validate correctly. XHTML is a markup language, just like HTML is. You can (ab)use tables in XHTML just like you can in HTML and still have it validate. The main difference between HTML and XHTML is that HTML is based on SGML, whereas XHTML is an application of XML designed to work like HTML (in layman's terms anyway - and I do admit, I did get part of it wrong). The thing about XHTML though is that 99.995% of the people who use it aren't even using it properly, since it's being served as plain HTML (with some syntax errors). It's not better than HTML, nor is it any worse. It's just different, albeit more demanding with its rules. I suggest you read these before writing another line of XHTML code. Seriously. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445 http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=428205 http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=320391
For as long as we have to jump through hoops and hacks just to get simple columnar layouts there are always going to be people using tables to get what they need done ASAP.
The thing is, hoops and hacks (99.995% of the time) aren't even necessary. It's a lack of proper understanding of how HTML and CSS work inside the browsers that's the real problem. But that's another discussion best saved for another day (and another thread).
In my opinion, tables should've never existed. I suggest going to HTML/CSS as fast as possible. Tables in my opinion, have already died.
Tables are to be used for marking up tabular data, not laying out Web sites. They have their place, and thankfully the abuse of tables for the purpose of layout are quickly on their way out (now if only Joomla could realize that ).