DIVs and Tables

[Reliable]

Now I know the word table in the design world is almost blasphemous (lol), but it seems that whereas a table will expand/contract with the content so the page still renders nicely a div will not and force you to have to manually resize it to get a nice page. Am I correct or is ti something I am missing?

[MidiMagic]

WRONG!

Table is not blasphemous, except with some idiots who don't understand what the W3C really wants people to avoid.

The things the W3C wants to remove are:

1. The use of tables to create margins, borders, and padding effects. Before CSS, table was the only way to make them.

2. The use of tables where the row and column announcements made by accessibility page readers for the blind do not make any sense in the page context.

There is a real problem: Div can't do what table can do in respect to keeping a structure together. Div is fluid in nature, and falls apart when things don't fit.

My rule on this is:

- Use table to create structures where it is important that the parts stay together in a gridlike pattern.

- Use div in other cases.

[Dani]

I am of the belief that you should always have a tableless design. By this I mean that the actual layout of the design itself should be tableless ... Tables can be used for tabular content within the page but shouldn't be used to structure the layout.

[Reliable]

BOth good answers whose content somewhat overlaps. I think I'll apply both in the future.

When I first started designing I read that DIVs were becoming the new standard so I stayed away from tables making my first project, retrospectively speaking, of course, more difficult and, therefore, more time consuming than it had to be.

[infotechland]

Same here Reliable, when I first started (About 5 months ago) the very first thing anyone ever said to me was tables are a no no for anything other than displaying things that should be displayed as tabular data, but under no circumstances for your layout. And it did make it a pain, but it helped me learn, so I guess its a good thing huh?

[Reliable]

Yep. There's no such thing as a bad experience if you learn from it.