Basically a tableless layout requires less html tags hence the statement is true. If you are going to boost the loading time I suggest you to avoid the inline styling as well.
with a lot of your web traffic using broadband, I doubt there will be much difference in load times between using tables to layout your site or using div layers.. While using tables can cause more code it wouldn't cause more than a few kb in file size to be transfered depending on how many tables you actually have.. the real reason you should be using div layers vs tables is due to best practice.. tables were not meant for layouts according to what I have read.
tables are way slower and look alot worse, the only time u should ever use tables is if u need to sort multiple rows of information in an organized manner. so pretty much u should always use css just my opinion
I agree with the above. I used to design my websites in tables simply because it's simpler to organize things. However, now I try to use DIV where ever I can. It will make a difference in terms of load time. Plus it looks more professional for those that do look at your source code.
Agree with everyone above me. DIV tags seem to make the page feel more professional and "lighter". I still use tables to sort a bunch on info. Also it is easier for the search engines to read your content when you use DIV tags instead of tables. It's not that div tags are prettier than tables, it is that they're much easier to crawl b/c spiders can find the content without having to sort through tons of nested tables. Tables just makes it harder for spiders to find the true content on your website. Not only that, with DIV you can position your most important content first and everything else after such as footers, headers, navigation. Some tend to believe position of the content is not important but I believe it is. I also like to list it like this: first the Header DIV, than the Content DIV and finally the Navigation DIV. My 2 cents Skee
Divs are better, not just because of less code, but because client's browser usually can render the format faster. Nested tables can impact a client's CPU. Plus divs are better for all the above reasons, search engines, etc.
If you use table-layout:fixed - 99% of this 'faster' rubbish is exactly that...Rubbish... More than that, it's a huge steaming pile of myth. The ONLY thing it effects is render time not load time, and can in fact "load" faster if a table can be done in less code. Less code = less bandwidth, less bandwidth equals faster ACTUAL LOAD TIME. (anyone who tells you otherwise is packing you full of manure) It's another of the 'myths' propagated about tables by people who have no ****ing clue what they are talking about. Quite frankly if a 386/40 running IE4 on Win 3.1 could handle rendering a table in an acceptable amount of time, then arguing about it today in the multi-core multi-ghz world is complete and utter bullshit. That does NOT mean use a table for everything. The problem as always is the overuse of tags when not appropriate. The same people who wrote fat bloated nested tables today just churn out fat bloated nested DIV's. Seriously, look at this: http://battletech.hopto.org/html_tutorials/3coltable.html Pull that off using DIV's with ACTUAL stretchable columns (faux columns or borders for color == fail) in less code with full on formatting. That example shoots down 80% or so of the anti-table mafia's bullshit rants, claims and myths about tables... and don't give me that 'it's not tabular data' bullshit either - A table is a orderly division of content into rows and/or columns... therin it can be considered tabular data. (though that's arguing semantics) The only anti-table arguement that holds weight is changing column orders from the CSS... The rest hold water like a steel sieve. (the best kind of sieve) and yet people lap up this rheotoric like it was the gospel.
This is wrong. Tables do effect rendering/load time, and when I was working for Lucent we ran many benchmark trials and tests on our internal intranet sites to determine just how much. Now, this was a few years ago, before the days of multi-Ghz CUPs, but not everyone today has a brand new, super fast CPU. And I don't know what you think is acceptable, but a 386 with IE4 takes over 30 secs on a local high-bandwidth connection to render 4 layer multiple nested tables. I have 3 PCs which I always test sites on before production, and one is an older Win XP with IE6, which just chugs along with a slow P4 1.0 Ghz and 256 MB ram. Why? Because there are lots of people still out there with such systems (30% of all website traffic still uses IE6, more than FF)! And because I develop sites for the kinds of large clients who need to know there site has been tested on every kind of platform. And you better believe I have to sit and wait for a page to load when it has 4 layers of nested tables. The same site, when recoded for XHTML/CSS with Div tags can *always* be rendered and drawn faster. Does that mean you should never use tables? No, of course not. Tables have lots of uses and a properly coded single table will load no faster or slower than a Div tag. I am specifically talking about multiple, nested tables, the kind which amatuer programmers tend to construct in Deamweaver or Front page because they don't know how to code properly.
How much of that is bandwidth from piss poor coding practices and not using table-layout:fixed - how much of that is actual 'render' time. Remember, the REAL bottleneck is NOT render time no matter how much some people claim it is, the REAL bottleneck is and remains BANDWIDTH - in which case whatever uses the least code is probably the best answer. Anyone telling you otherwise is packing you full of sand and does NOT know what they are talking about. If you are talking render time, load it LOCALLY off your hard drive so you remove bandwidth from the equation and see how big a difference it makes - the answer is so small you can't even see it. Therin RENDER time is not the problem - bandwidth is. ... and remember, table-layout:fixed tells the browser to start rendering as soon as it has data, making ZERO difference in render time - at least once you get the CSS loaded. If you have a layout that needs to nest more than two deep, the layout needs to be rethought. Four deep? MISERABLE ****ING FAIL. 95%+ of pages as a table based layout should use ONE table only (and then only the columns in the table). It goes back to what I said - the people that wrote shit fat bloated nested tables today just write fat bloated nested DIV's... and again, if it's less bandwidth, the rest IS BULLSHIT. Seriously, I see websites where with 'proper' indenting you end up ten tabs in before you even hit CONTENT - /FAIL/ /FAIL/ /FAIL/ /FAIL/ /FAIL/ You see the same **** with people putting tables around SINGLE ELEMENTS or single columns - complete miserable /FAIL/ yet you see it all the time.