CSS v tables

[tinyjo]

It seems that tableless CSS designs are all the rage, but why is tableless considered good? What's wrong with tables? Enquiring minds want to know.

I think when I get round to doing a new design for my website I might try this out so I can learn it. I've also been toying with the idea of an xml stylee thing (not quite sure how yet) so that I would have an easy time swapping things round in future. Hmmm. Roll on S2 that's what I say :)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Technically speaking, whenever you use table tags to mean anything other than to arrange tabular data, you are lying, just as all those p tags used to adjust vertical spacing (i.e., that are not actually paragraphs) are lies. The problem is that older web browsers require is to lie through our teeth to get the visual results we want -- because they do not lay out paragraphs the way we want, or don t have a tag for ‘this is a displayed equation’, we have had to fudge things by ‘misusing’ HTML tags.

XML + CSS in principle allow us to code up documents with a logical structure that correctly expresses the intention of the document consydered as pure information, while at the same time presenting it in a way that we think is pretty. The main point of discussion is whether we can start to ignore the way it is presented in older browsers that do not grok CSS.