table or table-less

[JohnE]

This is a general inquiry from a discussion that some people were having last
week. They were discussing whether to use tables in webapp design or go
tableless. Everyone was using VS2008 (at least they agreed on something). I
thought this topic would be a good idea to toss out to this newsgroup to see
what others do (or use or not use) in designing your webapps. Plus it gets
you away from the usual discussion topics and allows you to express your
opinions and thoughts.
Thanks.

 

[Jonathan Wood]

This is a general inquiry from a discussion that some people were having
last
week. They were discussing whether to use tables in webapp design or go
tableless. Everyone was using VS2008 (at least they agreed on something).
I
thought this topic would be a good idea to toss out to this newsgroup to
see
what others do (or use or not use) in designing your webapps. Plus it
gets
you away from the usual discussion topics and allows you to express your
opinions and thoughts.

To be sure, the answer to this seems somewhat based on what is currently in
vogue and I see nothing inherently wrong with using tables for layout.

That said, I do think there are some advantages to using CSS instead of
tables for overall page layout. Some of these advantages related to the
degree with which you can control each layout element, and the ability this
gives you to create completely different layouts using the exact same HTML.

So, yes, if it's a table then use an HTML table. But if you are laying out a
page design, I'd use CSS.

 

[Guest]

This is a general inquiry from a discussion that some people were having last
week.  They were discussing whether to use tables in webapp design or go
tableless.  Everyone was using VS2008 (at least they agreed on something).  I
thought this topic would be a good idea to toss out to this newsgroup to see
what others do (or use or not use) in designing your webapps.  Plus it gets
you away from the usual discussion topics and allows you to express your
opinions and thoughts.
Thanks.

If your application is using ASP.NET controls such as GridView, etc. -
they generate tables.

 

[Patrice]

Hi,

They were discussing whether to use tables in webapp design or go
tableless.

This is not an exclusive option. A trend we saw lately is CSS based design
as tables were sometimes used for achieving complex layouts where CSS would
have been more flexible. It doesn't meant that you should never use tables.
So in short :
- if you have tabular data, do use tables
- this is if you use a table to obtain a particular layout that you can see
if an alternate CSS design would be better...

My personal preference is :
- to stick to table for simple layouts
- and sometimes use CSS for more complex layout (IMO simple layouts are
easier to obtain with tables than with CSS and CSS still have some
shortcomings in corner case edges). For exemple a design such as
http://www.airyproductions.com/eaglehue.htm is good but how to prevent it
from going wild when the windows is narrowed as much as you can ? A table
will just stop its horizontal compression at some point.