Should Tables be avoided in HTML at any cost?

Question

It is advisable to use tables in HTML pages (now that we have CSS)?

What are the applications of tables? What features/abilities does tables have that are not in CSS?

Answer 1

Scanning over these answers, I didn't see one real-world reason where tables are necessary for layout and that is html emails.

I work for a very, very large financial company and we track around 600 different jobs a month....many of which are multiple email campaigns.

You cannot use css for layout for any mail reader. There are a few inline css specs you can use that relate to color, font face and size and even line-height is fairly widely available but for layout, you have to use tables as all the major and most minor email readers (Outlook 97/03, Entourage, MSN etc) read them just fine.

The issues with tables come into play when you have td's that do not have height/width specified whether they contain data or not. So, 'broken' table layouts are usually fixed by paying attention to attributes and yes... whitespace in the html....yes whitespace that isn't supposed to matter.

So, if you ever work for a large company/corporation or you land a very large client, be ready to throw all the current technology out the door and get your html table hat on!