I was wondering if most of you code with tables, or without tables using <div> and CSS. Which one is easier? Which one is faster? Which one tends to look better? Which one is more professional (i.e. used by most designers)?
So let's say you were coding this using <div> and CSS: http://tinyurl.com/5omrbj (example)^ When you design it, do you design the full page, slice it up, then take out the text, save it through Photoshop as optimized and code the text in? Or do you code the entire page piece by piece by hand? With my HTML skills (hmm should I learn PHP? Anyway....I know all the basics of HTML, a little more, and I'm sort of new to positioning divs but I think I get it now) how long would you say it should take me to code that page? In hours, preferably...or days Also...What skills should I have down for coding with <div>s and CSS? (e.g. Knowledge of divs (obviously), know how to position, know how to ??, etc.) A lot of questions but if you could answer them I'd appreciate it.
Mostly Div is used these days.. but tables are always used inbetween div tags.. you can see the source code for teh sites you like.. If having problem in designing whole webpage throguh coding you can use WYSWYG editors like Dreamweaver as a fresher..
If you want to layout your webpage, use <div>. But if your information is Tabular then use <table>. Don't use <table> to set your page layout. Don't use <div> to display your information as a table.
div and css are the best: fully customizable, rather easy once you get used to styling and extensively useful for future reference in web-design. BTW it's usefl to have some kind of guide for css as it isn't easy to remember in such a short tme.
*Very* basically - I design a site in photoshop - logos, headers, menu positioning, background etc. leaving space for content, menu text, everything else. I use the rulers to cut the site into pieces, and (usually) save out a very plain background image, the logo, any extra bits here and there as jpegs or gifs. Then I start with a basic page, and build my site around the logos and images. I stopped using tables a couple of years back after maybe ten years of laying out with tables and transparent gifs (!). Now everything is done with divs and CSS, I can code sites that validate perfectly and degrade beautifully. You can position everything just fine with some carefully sized and placed floats. Just read, learn and experiment as often as you can! I suggest you learn how to build a basic site from scratch, by hand. Any modern tutorials should show you how to do this with DIVs and CSS - I've been debating writing a good one for ages - maybe I will in the next couple of weeks. I have a neat little code library of stuff I've already done - very skeleton sites - only 10 or 15 lines of code, but enough to not type the boring stuff out again. I could quite happily design a very pretty looking page with logo and whatnot, code it and stick it on the web in less than an hour. Of course adding content is the part that takes the time, and a site that may have taken a hour or two to design and code can often end up taking days in research and content writing. If I'm adding dynamic content, php scripts, content management or whatever, or designing for a client, it could take me much longer to do a site. Days or weeks isn't unreasonable. Custom scripts and stuff takes me much longer to do, despite the fact my PHP is reasonably good. Hope that helps a little.
I still use tables, but the majority of people use DIV. It allows for a more consistent layout across different browsers.
If it's not tabular data, then I don't use the <table> tag to display it, as that makes no sense! I wouldn't say I use <div>'s for everything though, when I need a divider, I will use a <div>, but I also use <ul> and other block level elements in place of tables sometimes. Nick
Learn to code by hand. That's what professionals do. They have good reasons for that. Just get some good text editor (PSPad is my favorite) and start coding it step by step. That website - personally I am able to code it by hand in 30 minutes up to 1 hour (maybe even less - it doesn't seem complicated). Once you get experienced enough, you will be able to code by hand extremely fast. In order to become a CSS expert, you should first learn how to use the most important CSS attributes, how to use them correctly. You should also pay attention to web standards and accessibility and change your coding style according to that. You can start here: http://www.w3schools.com/css/
I don't think there are any differences between how table-based and CSS-based layouts look that aren't a result of a particular designer's strength or weakness as a designer/coder. Even though the best designs these days tend to use CSS, that's not because CSS itself makes for better looking pages. It's because good designers tend to be on top of the latest best practices. I'm sure a good designer/coder could reproduce most table-based layouts in CSS and you wouldn't know the difference, and vice versa. Not saying I'm a good designer/coder, but I use CSS myself
divs and css for most content..tabular data should be table-based... someone said tables were easier...not really..once you get the hang of it-css based sites using divs are really not that hard