Tables vs CSS

x-raysteve · Joined: 01 Feb 2006 Posts: 53

The common feeling is that you should use CSS instead of tables whenever possible. I grew up in an era where there was no CSS and tables were the way to lay things out on a page in html.

My question is, besides the management side of things and the finer aesthetic control, is there anything inherently wrong with using tables in your pages from time-to-time, or should everything be parsed through CSS?

administrator · Site Admin Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 183

Using CSS is a better SEO practice and it can help improve your rankings in the search engines.
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Missie · Joined: 06 Feb 2006 Posts: 25

Stitch · Joined: 07 Feb 2006 Posts: 43

Tables are for tablature data.

CSS is:

Faster
More spider friendly
more flexible
easier to edit if using an external style sheet for all your pages
etc.

administrator · Site Admin Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 183

Stitch · Joined: 07 Feb 2006 Posts: 43

x-raysteve · Joined: 01 Feb 2006 Posts: 53

Why is css more spider friendly if everything is in an external file? Can spiders not read tables?

ComDriver · Joined: 06 Mar 2006 Posts: 8

I'd have to say I prefer CSS. When used properly you can get great results and your code is so much cleaner, especially when using an external file.

paul · Joined: 11 Oct 2004 Posts: 128

CSS is the way to go. If you have any data that should be presented in a nicely formated HTML table, just do it, but otherwise just use CSS.

All my new sites are done with CSS, and I'm not going back to tables Smile

Paul
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bongo · Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 11

I think nowadays most of the developing sites will be using CSS. It isn't hard to learn, you can just pick up a book in the bookstore and you will coding in no time. CSS offers more possibilities than tables.

paul · Joined: 11 Oct 2004 Posts: 128

Another important thing is that if you use CSS your HTML is much cleaner and the HTML files are smaller in size, because there are no 10's of nested tables Wink

in your code.

Paul
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Kurtis · Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 9

That's true Paul.
If your code is clean and simple, consisting mostly of content rather than tags, the search engines have an easier time reading it.

Generally just using simple div tags and styling them externally through CSS will cut down the amount of code in your html file quite dramatically.