Am I the only one that notices that if you have a full table layout the tables load first (with the colours) then the content, though with DIV/CSS full layouts the content loads first, then the layout turns on. Just a little thought that kept pondering in my mind. Has anyone else noticed it??
That is the biggest disadvantage of Table. The content is visible only after the whole table is loaded (atleast the whole row is loaded). This is a well known fact
So I take it using a full DIV / CSS layout is a good thing? (Like for search engine spiders - especially if your site loads pretty slowly)
Yes, I find it okay as long as the design is rendered styling the content after the css loads. Few clients have complained about this behavior, for them I unhide the container div after the page loads. They seem to be happy with it. They are happy, I am happy :0
It takes a good amount of time to create a cross browser table less design. But it is worth the effort.
First, any non-trivial table layout takes longer to render than the same design in css. A table requires at least two passes to display, and the file size of all the table and other presentation markup will nearly always be larger than the html + css files of a modern web page. Second, you seem to be witnessing a flash of unstyled content, or fouc. That's an IE bug; Google is your friend. Just one more reason to loathe that pig of a browser. cheers, gary