Ok to Use SOME Table Elements in New Designs

silverwex

Ive been studying CSS for past month now and love it but think laying out a webpage using 100% CSS is a little too gimmicky for my liking.

Is it ok to use maybe 3 tables just to line up main elements and use CSS on rest of site or is this frowned upon in the Web 2.0 era?

Thanks

aidan_walsh

Tables are used to be used for the layout of data, and not for site layout.

silverwex

Thanks but can you elaborate?

MrsJohnMurphy

silverwex wrote: »

Thanks but can you elaborate?

I think he means you should use a table to display data e.g. a football league table on a page, or say a list of departure times but you should not use a table to force a design layout.

mjm

p

silverwex wrote: »

Ive been studying CSS for past month now and love it but think laying out a webpage using 100% CSS is a little too gimmicky for my liking.
Is it ok to use maybe 3 tables just to line up main elements and use CSS on rest of site or is this frowned upon in the Web 2.0 era?

Well, it's considered bad practice. If you're not doing a professional site then it's more than fine however. Also, if you're still learning it, making a 'hybrid' site that uses some tables and some CSS can also be a good way to bridge the gap while you're learning.

I highly recommend reading through this tutorial:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/

Liam Byrne

silverwex wrote: »

Is it ok to use maybe 3 tables just to line up main elements and use CSS on rest of site or is this frowned upon in the Web 2.0 era?

Yup, it's frowned upon.

And it also makes otherwise simple websites MUCH more awkward to edit and update, because you have to combine / split table cells at some stage - for no proper reason.

Add in the fact that the code vs content ratio gets hammered, and you've got a slower site, bloated code, and less SEO response.

If you're professional, it's essential.
And if you're learning, why learn the wrong way ?

leom

I thought Tables were obsolete too and on mysite not a single table is being used. But recently I found that ebay uses tables heavily. All of its contents(ads ) being displayed are in tables (Layout). Google adsens page uses tables too...
Now you decide.......Do you know a site which is more professional than ebay and google.....

p

leom wrote: »

I thought Tables were obsolete too and on mysite not a single table is being used. But recently I found that ebay uses tables heavily. All of its contents(ads ) being displayed are in tables (Layout). Google adsens page uses tables too...
Now you decide.......Do you know a site which is more professional than ebay and google.....

Of course.
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
http://www.wired.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

Google & ebay use tables for layout because they're fairly old sites and were built in the 90s and upgrading something would take a huge amount of time & money.

It'd be silly to be a new site from scratch using those legacy techniques though.

mattfinucane

I would strongly advise against using tables for anything else other than displaying tabular data. Learning web development has a huge curve and takes years of dedication and practice.

The only time you will need to use tables for layout is when coding HTML emails. A lot of email clients, most notably Microsoft Outlook 2007, will only render table based html emails reliably.

Best of luck in your endevours.

leom

p wrote: »

Of course.
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
http://www.wired.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

Google & ebay use tables for layout because they're fairly old sites and were built in the 90s and upgrading something would take a huge amount of time & money.

It'd be silly to be a new site from scratch using those legacy techniques though.

Google or ebay would be earning much more than combined earnings of all mentioned site. And no body would have any doubt that these ebay and google folks know their stuff. If there was any problems in using tables. They would have changed it.
I am not suggesting that we should use tables for layout, but if tables are must needed for layout, I dont see any harm in using them.

mattfinucane

leom wrote: »

Google or ebay would be earning much more than combined earnings of all mentioned site. And no body would have any doubt that these ebay and google folks know their stuff. If there was any problems in using tables. They would have changed it.
I am not suggesting that we should use tables for layout, but if tables are must needed for layout, I dont see any harm in using them.

It's bad practice now especially with more modern browsers negating the need for table based design. Don't do it. It's really bad practice.