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Five reasons to switch from tables to CSS

Many of you may think that no one uses tables anymore, but you’ll be nicely surprised at the percentage of people that do. With that in mind, I have jotted down 5 random points of why people should switch to CSS.

  1. Separation of content and design
    While using tables, quick fixes are never quick. You loathe editing that glaring spelling mistake, because for the love of life, you can’t find it amidst all the table, tr, and td tags! And God forbid you accidentally delete one of these!! All the design, painstakingly gotten together through Dreamweaver, is dud.
    With CSS, however, your content is cleanly separated from the content, and finding a mistake is as easy as reading the passages.
  2. Semantics
    If you care one bit about semantics, you’ll stop using tables. Tables are meant to be used for tabular data. Period. blocks of text should be enclosed with the p tag.
    Ok, so the div tag isn’t the king of semantics, but it’s at least better than a table. div represents a block, be it text, images, dynamic content, or all three. Tables represents tabular data, not design.
  3. All the cool kids use CSS
    You’re cool, right? You jive with the times, don’t you? Or, better yet, you’re ahead of your times! Let me assure you. All the cool kids use CSS now, and tables won’t return in the future too. We’re going to bury table based designs for good.
  4. Power to the stylesheet!
    If you’ve ever used colored links, you’ve already harnessed the power of CSS. CSS is built from ground up to design beautiful sites. Tables aren’t. Once you realize the full potential of CSS, you’ll be shocked at why you didn’t use it from the beginning.
  5. Help when you need it
    If you get in trouble trying to design a table laden site, chances are, you’ll become bald faster than you solve the problem. The case is shockingly different in CSS.
    People all around the globe are so happy with the capabilities of CSS that almost everyone chips in to help make newcomers’ time better. You’ll always get help with your problem. There are excellent forums for CSS such as Web Design-L and CSS-Discuss, which cater to newcomers and experts alike.

I will hopefully have more posts about these in the future. Meanwhile, practice CSS!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under css. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Five reasons to switch from tables to CSS”

  1. kristin Says:
    June 6th, 2006 at 7:59 pm

    YEAH. I’m a cool kid.

  2. James / AkaXakA Says:
    June 6th, 2006 at 9:06 pm

    Only 2 for me: It’s more powerful and it’s more efficient (both in size and time).

    The others are all reasons to not not-do it.

  3. ikram_zidane Says:
    June 9th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    IMO… table also uses css… for me, css is to be use cuz..
    1 ) save bandwith.. probably the best reason..
    2 ) future web standard..
    3 ) as you say, to seperate content and design.. actually, to seperate structure and presentation..
    4 ) css can be easilly coded.. i prefer by hand

    IMHO, there’s really nothing got to do with being cool..

  4. Devin Says:
    June 14th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

    As a lazy coder I wish there were good WYSIWYG editors (like DW) that make CSS divs instead of tables.. do you know of any?

  5. Indranil Says:
    June 17th, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    *James* : Why exactly are these points reasons not to switch?

    *ikram_zidane* : tables use CSS? come again? And, yes, I agree.. being cool is quite apart from switching to CSS.

    *Devin* : There is Dreamweaver which has support for it. There was an article in Community MX somewhere.. Can’t find it now. Will give it to you when I do.

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