Hello guys, I do table design on all my sites currently, but I'm considering switching. I've heard so much about table-less designing being the correct way to do it. On the other hand, though, sites like Google.com and even w3schools.com still use tables for columns and structure. What do you guys think? How important is it to do table-less designing?
It's as important as you feel it is. There are no laws requiring accessibility yet, but there are still many advantages to CSS over tables
Search engines likely don't care at this point, but I stick to using tables only when displaying tabular data. That's how it should be. CSS!
It seems someone starts this same thread about every three days. Did you run a search before posting? There is no question that all the advantages lie with css based layouts. To argue for table layouts is to argue from ignorance or from fear of learning something new and different. CSS layouts are so much simpler to do and the html markup is orders of magnitude cleaner than any nontrivial table layout. If anyone thinks tables are easier, they don't yet know what they're doing in css. I'll admit to being an 'old hand' of sorts (if anyone can be considered an old hand ), starting to experiment with css layouts in 2001 with the advent of IE6 and Netscape6. By late 2002, I had coded my last table layout. I just cannot believe so many web developers are resisting the change. In any profession, the master craftsman stays abreast of advances and employs only the best tools. The developers who haven't, or won't make the change away from table layouts can only be considered amateurs, at best. cheers, gary
Sites like you have mentioned are old school and haven't had a manger update for a while. Take a look at any new website or recently updated website and it will be using CSS for sure if done the write way. What he means by amateurs is people just simple slice it up in photoshop and then drop it in to dreamweaver, then say hey yeah i'm a webs designer! any old monkey can do that. The real skill lies in coding it your self by hand using CSS and XHTML. Tables really look nasty in your code, make pages larger in size, slower loading, usually rely heavy on images where CSS can use just a few to get the same effect, very hard and slow process to make large scale changes to the site design, need any more? You will notice the ALIKES of vBulletin in there updates and completely new open source software are all using CSS for layout purposes now, wordpress for example. CSS is far better and in the very near future all professional sites will be using it.
There is a world of difference between developing a site and maintaining old legacy code. If those same developers create a new site using table layouts, then yes, they're amateurs. cheers, gary
I do most of my sites using tableless now that I have gained a lot of experience with using CSS for my sites. I come from a software engineering background so I like things to be easily maintainable. Having all or most of the presentation and layout information in one file makes that very easy.
Table-less designs are better for me than tabled design. You just use divs, and search engine friendly.
I agree with 1EightT. I did not totally abandoned tables. Tables account less than 10% of my pages. I only use it for tabular data. Not for layout. I use <div> as much as possible.
noen of the poll options are correct. The correct answer is: both are acceptable for difference purposes on the same page.