Choosing Layout: Css-Layout or Table-Layout

[hpourfard]

Hi,

After I designed my page (using several tables), while I was surfing
the web I considered a professional looking web site which had been
used DIV tags instead of tables, with many css classes. for sure
designing in div layers is much more time consuming. so there should be
a good reason for using table less layout. May be it affect Search
Engines Ranking, Accessibility or just for Separating Structure and
Presentation. anyway I don't know to continue my old way or change my
design. can anybody help?


Thanks
H. Pourfard

 

[John Timney \(MVP\)]

I find DIV's much easier to work with than Tables, and significantly more
readable in the source code, hence I can be a lot more productive using DIV
positioning. If you step back in time to the creation of the web - Tables
are meant to store rows and columns of data, not for format of document
layouts and table pages are often made up of tables nested inside each other
making it difficult for browsers to render, and a nightmare to create. CSS
was added to assist with making sites aesthetic and to make placement of
elements easier and to allow you to easily (easier) design your site with
screen readers and accessibility in mind.

In my humble opinion - CSS/Divs are the correct technology for page layout
and cosmetics. Tables are the correct technology for listing tabular data.
That doesn't mean I always follow this rule - and audience, time or a damned
confusing requirement can easily influence when this is applied.

A couple of good links for you:

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=TablesVsDivs

http://www.mardiros.net/liquid-css-layouts-4.html

Essential read
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#tables-layout

Regards

John Timney (MVP)