Tableless CSS web design?
We received this email:
Sir or Madam,
Quite an impressive display of sites. I am a student, studying computer science, and have a question for your designers.
What are your designers’ opinion on the trend towards tableless CSS designs, and the idea that all formatting should be removed from the content.
I noticed that the source of some of your sites use tables for the layout. I disagree with my professors, as he believes tables are, for a lack of a better word, “evil”.
I use some css for site design, but sometimes find the pressure to use all CSS can drag out completion time in order to hack my way around browser limitations.
If you would share your well-qualified opinions, I would be most appreciative.
Have a blessed day,
Matthew L.
Ah, good question.
Truth is you and your professor are both right. From a theoretical standpoint, there are some very good reasons to strive for total separation of design and content, particularly if the data will get reused in other media. However, in practice, browser rendering engines have quirks that take hours of extra development time to work around to achieve CSS only design.
Most of the sites we design, do have tables (we work to minimize the use of tables and superfluous markup). We have done some that are CSS only. The CSS sites take, on average, 3x as long to code and test across browsers. Given we live in the world of dollars and cents, most of our clients cannot cost justify the additional cost of CSS only design.
In addition we build all our sites to be accessed by visually impaired web users. One feature of accessibility is the ability for the user to resize text. This causes most CSS only designs to place text on top of each other. Tables work great to prevent overlapping of variable size text. When all major browsers universally interpret CSS the same way, we will move to full CSS.
That is the difference between the academic world and business, for clients you have to get a positive ROI. It is similar to why most of our programming is in PHP. Years ago we did Java programming (we have also done projects in ASP & ColdFusion). Java and J2EE is a very in lighted development environment. We even use to lecture about separation of data, business logic, interface logic and creative. “The way of the future”, we proclaimed.
Then the .dot com bubble burst. Despite Java being a near perfect language from a programming theory standpoint, the truth is it’s complicated and you don’t need that kind of horsepower for most applications. In practice, PHP is much faster/less costly to develop. Back in my Java days, I described weakly typed, hacker languages such as Perl and PHP as “Evil” also. Funny how a recession can make you look more practically at things.
That being said, it is good your professor is making you do it the academic way. When we hire, we look for people with strong theoretical backgrounds. School should be more about learning how to think then the practicalities of the real world.
Good luck with your studies!
Category: General Thoughts, Web Development, Web Technical
August 5th, 2006 at 10:49 am
As the lead developer of our websites I’d like to correct Tom’s estimate. Our current total development time for a tableless design vs a tabled design is close to dead even. As browsers increase in quality and developers learn new techniques, it is becoming more and more common to employ strict semantic information architecture within web pages. Also, each of us have different skillsets, and if one does not have mastery of a skillset, of course it will take longer to use that unfamiliar method of development. I actually had a rough time readjusting to such extensive use of tables when I started working here, and consequently took longer to develop a site using tables than not!
It’s also worth noting that there’s a difference between using one table for the overall layout of your site and using tables to create visual elements, e.g. borders or padding to an element. Tables aren’t ‘evil’ in all layout situations but they are an inferior and outdated method of maintaining a visual design on a website.
In my opinion, it is silly to dismiss a very sound and sensible method of development just because there is an older technique around whose main advantage is extreme legacy support. Also, one can only become better at other techniques with practice. The ‘extra’ hours spent applying workarounds will eventually add up to a more thorough understanding of the technology rather than just wasted workaround time.
As we watch web technologies become more advanced, greater importance is being placed on the semantic value of your HTML as the structure of a document, rather than a visual placeholder. It promotes the interoperability of data (between media as Tom noted) and more direct accessibility to a wider range of audiences.
I’m sure the mistakes and shortcuts of the web’s initial big players will haunt us for 10-20 years, but the only way to improve the web is to put the theory into practice.
April 10th, 2007 at 2:09 am
This is pretty good topic to disucss.
I too supports the table less design over table based design.
One of the major reasons are table less designs are most search engine friendly rather than table design. Because search engiens try to view a website like a human being. In this approach for search engiones it is hard to visualize a website if it is full of nested tables. If it is in the case of css based design search engines will easiely visulize the site. Let me show you the live example.
search for ‘Tableless seo friendly design’ in google search. you can find www.comogroupap.com.au/seo-friendly.php in top. you can see the seo friendly deisign tips in this website.
Thank You
March 20th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Hi ,
my self archana. I am a web designer, i work with table based design and also known with table less design but not properly have knowledge about that..
so i need some help and want more study about table lessdesign.can u help me from which site i can do study properly.
Thank You