I have to ask this …

tables are the “old school” way of laying things out. since the development of CSS, tables have become unnecessary… and they “bloat” your code, making page/file sizes bigger than they need to be, and therefore take longer to load (yes, even by 10 seconds), are not as flexible as CSS divs, and are just flat out ugly… as compared to nice clean divs.

here’s an article that actually just found it’s way into my inbox… coincidence, eh?

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=173692

EternalSkyChaz – I know 🙂 It’s the “tables are evil and should be banned” crowd that is aimed at 🙂

Hi,

I use CSS when it’s appropriate and more elegant and tables when they are appropriate and elegant to use.

And I couldn’t care less what others say about this.

Tables will stay around for a long time and yes, not just for tabular data.

Not simply because they are “old school” and old school users haven’t yet (by a long way) died out. There are more reasons:

– cross browser compatibility

Especially with simple, basic rectangular (well, tablebased) design including simple needs (like e.g. outlines and equal column lengths/widths) nothing is currently (and for quite a while yet to judge by new IE7) as crossbrowser compatible as tables. CSS falls short by several furlongs in this field.

– backwards compatibility

Here CSS very practically fails nearly completely (like a 95% failure), even when regarding also a crossbrowser backwards compatibility. Old browsers (want it or not) *will* stay with us for years to come as well. I work a lot for areas where the old browsers (IE4, Netscape4 and lower) are the standard, due hardware restrictions. You simply can’t install new software/browsers on a 40MB harddrive. And these old browsers will not render CSS at all in most cases, while they will render almost identically simple tables. Just lose your CSS file and try to read and navigate your WP this way and you’ll get my drift.

– simplicity and CSS bloat

There are designs which ARE tabular, insofar that they were drawn with the standard paper letter/magazine format in mind in the most simple way possible. With such design more often than not CSS is several times larger spacewise and much more complicated in writing than the very simple table which would also take these data, especially when you want the result crossbrowser-fast. In such cases there’s still no better and more economic way than that simple table.

Given these facts it’s easy to see why we’ll live with those “shameful” tables for a long while yet. Taking IE’s basic turnover timeframe we can expect this to be at least another 6-10 years for sure.

As to your question:

It’s actually not a technical answer you should look for, as there is no real technical answer for this. Tables more often than not do the exact same as CSS and by doing this with all of the net including net technology still being non-standardized one couldn’t truly care less which is used.

The answer is psycho-sociological instead. As a tagline you could say “CSS is for geeks, tables are for practicians”.

Sounds funny, but is of course true. Webstandards are not written by web users and webdesigners, they are written by ivory-towered geeks. Programmers of software, especially open source software are – mostly – geeks. Not ivory towered ones, but often enough young, fashion-oriented and “hip” ones or idealistic, futuristic ones. Geeks, like just about any societal group, prefer to separate themselves from the “common masses”, they like to hold the superior view, to stay on top of fashion and outside “the hordes”, so to speak. I don’t even mean this negatively, it is the most common reaction of one group within society towards other groups. This sense and will to be “special” and “standing out” from the crowd. It’s normal.

One effect of this drive to distance themselves from others in the web world has been the damning of tables and holification of CSS. Another – for example – is the current semi-religious war for barrierfreeness. Just about as hot a topic as CSS.

So, the answer to your question isn’t really simple, even though it is simple: to those knowing quite a bit about socio-psychology.

My personal opinion stays as described above: I use what is best for what I want to do. And if I can best drive in a nail with a brick, instead of the latest cry in high-tech hammers, I’ll do that. The nail will be in the plank any which way.

🙂

I agree with ladydelaluna’s first post, tables are “old school”. My understanding was that tables were, by design, never meant to hold anything but simple text data in a table format. However at the time (prior to the development and browser support of CSS) it was the best way to achieve a complex layout consistently. I used to be a big fan of tables, because I thought they were so easy – CSS was a bit scary at first, but now it all makes sense and I can’t imagine using a table again!

There’s nothing per-say wrong with tables, but I think (and perhaps most might agree) that tables have been replaced by CSS as the de facto standard for achieving precise layouts. Tables seem to me, since I started using a real browser (ie: anything but IE) to not be as consistent as I once thought – maybe part of the vilification of tables here is due to the desire to maintain standards conformity, which generall would make any page look virtually the same in any standards compliant browser (ie: anything but IE) and certainly with templates and stuff, having just one style file to edit is probably easier and more straight-forward for new users as well.

Design your site however you choose and which best for your target viewership!

Cheers,
Michael.

P.S. Tables are evil 😉

i used to never understand why people didn’t like using tables untill i latched on to using css. And now i stay away from using tables if possible.

Hi again,

yep, moshu, I have many (!) clients from beyond the former iron curtain AND many from far down south(-east) from where I live (which is Europe).

When I look at their server statistics I get numbers of more than 50% IE4, Netscape4, with just about any nowadays outlandish browser thrown in. When I visit them personally (yes, I occasionally travel there), they or their friends often proudly present me with a 386 or 486 oooooold, old, OLD computer chugging away nicely in their living room on a Win98 or Win95 (and sometimes even a Win3.1) setup. Sometimes this setup sits in the local version of internet cafe or the library. And that’s not going to change soon.

Any site I do for this type of audience will get extremely little CSS (only direct styling of colors, fonts, fontsizes, if any) and a clearcut tabular layout. I so far don’t use WP for those, as I still have to find a way to accommodate such hardware/software with WP. There are very few OSS CMS/blog softwares which do so currently.

It’s just no fun looking at a webpage you pay for which is stark white, has none of the images you provided the designer with, has navigation and content spread out across immense vertical expanses in illogical manner and is completely or importantly broken functionswise. You quickly tire of scrolling yardwise up and down to navigate 😉

I also quite often get puzzled responses from this area of my netfriends, when I rave about this or that site, send them the URL and receive the answer “but that’s soo plain and soo uncomfy to read, what do you go on about?!”. Oops.

The problem truly is, that the “geek-crowd” (and mind me, I’m saying this humorously) tends to forget, that there is a HUGE planet out there, that not everyone is so fortunate as to having arrived – computerwise – in the year 2006, that not everyone can even AFFORD a modern computer, even if he knows what he misses out with an old, built from recycled components 386 or 486, or what it is like to surf with such a comp on a 28k or 56k modem on a thin copper phone line. And that’s not saying that the schism doesn’t exist even there. It’s different of course in the capitals and large cities even in these countries.

I remember reading a day or two ago about that guy who said “f**k those who don’t use 1024×768 and still have a 15″ monitor”. Well, that’s very exemplary of what I go on about here, ;-). And it’s a typical geekish view, as this guy simply can’t imagine that there are lots of people out there who still surf on 14″ monitors and dream of a good 15″ one.

Probably he really can do without this part of the net public, as high-tech sites usually are way beyond any possible reception by such low-tech crowds anyway. If I look at current load times (yes, I STILL care about load times and I still measure the sites I do by how fast they load with a 28k modem), I often rub my eyes.

@ladydelaluna: how many sites have you designed for people outside of the USA? Or rather let’s say for people not living where a 17″ monitor costs less than an average earner’s weekly pay and can be takeaway shopped without having to drive more than 100 miles? I’m talking both clients and intended audience here. None to judge by your browsers stats I’d say, which is of course fine by you and fine by me.

But it should not keep you from noticing how privileged and – even more importantly – how small your slice of the (net) world is that you deal with. And having such a constricted perception already qualifies – for me – partly for the term “geek” in this respect. 🙂 Please notice I’m smiling. I don’t hold this against you, nor do I say it’s something you could or should have done anything about.

What it however perfectly illustrates is that the current socalled “webstandards” are anything but. They are made and written by people living in a technological ivory tower who are completely unaware of the rest of this planet and what is still state of art there. They build and publish highly esoteric sites (when measured by all of this planet) which attract an equally select public and they go on from there. Instead of truly walking the whole planet.

As per that very nature of THEIR reality, these people fail to see that what they go on about and try to do is relevant only to a fraction of the population on Earth and a fraction of the people accessing the internet on it. To me that’s quite plainly a high, very high ivory tower and it’s why I say that current web standards are anything but. Most assuredly they are not very practical the moment one steps out of this little corner of high technology area.

It’s pretty nonsensical to go on about XHTML-compliancy and CSS in a rave with people who can’t see and experience what you go on about. 🙂

And even with those who can, it often enough makes little sense. I checked that site proffered above, and clicked away from it after 5 minutes loading time and only little of the content visible on my screen (yes, at home I also still have to surf via 56k modem *g).

If they did that atrocious mess of overloaded frontpage in tables I can easily imagine why they were in trouble. But I bet you any sum, that using a clearer, less cluttered architecture and a different perspective of the audience’s intelligence I could have arrived at 10% of the size – and still use tables. This site suffers from many very important mistakes, the least important of which are whether to use tables or CSS.

Back in a circle: I firmly believe that blogging is a means of democratic expression very much needed EVERYwhere, especially needed in these “dark” regions of this world where little up-to-date technology is available. I’ve built many blogs for people there, to help them have a voice, to write about their POVs and lives, to publish and communicate – all of which is actually what the internet is about (and not the latest feature of FF or IE). However, if a blog software or an OSS community twists my hands on whether or not I can serve these people, I look elsewhere to help them. Which is why I participated in this very discussion. Sometimes it helps one’s perspective to truly look at facts outside one’s small bubble 😉 CSS-gurus should do that as much as anyone 🙂