CSS or Tables for layout?

Let’s first take a look at some history of the web, to get the full picture on this. The web believe it or not was initially created by the military to share information quickly. It was not meant to be pretty, and have a pile of graphics on the pages. The HTML was created to LOGICALLY mark-up the content provided on the website.

As the internet began to gain popularity, designers were tired of these boring looking websites and needed to add some flare to them. Due to this need browsers like IE and Mozilla added proprietary tags such as <font>, <blink>, etc…

They also needed to position elements on a page in a finite way, and not just one under another. Thus comes into play tables. It allows you to have elements side by side.

I’m not sure if you can imagine this now, but this can get quite complex and create a lot of mark-up. A table, within a table, within another tables cell, and yeah it gets ridiculous.

Enter CSS – which allows us to use our HTML for strictly mark-up and use CSS for presentation. Our HTML can use <div> tags to mark divisions in our pages, such as header – content – footer instead of having a table for each. We can then assign it an id and create a CSS rule to format the text however we want. Bold, Red, and Times New Roman

It does take some getting used to, but wow do the search engines love it. As well as this a sites layout can be completely changed without affection the HTML at all.

For an example, View My XHTML/CSS Project, and click a layout under the left side links

I don’t expect you all to be switching to CSS as it is not always that easy, but I hope to at least open your mind to the idea.

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