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

I have to go with the tables approach here. The reason for this comes simply down to cost. Until a well supported CSS-centric approach to layout comes out, and I am talking about at the macro level...not micro within containers, trying to shoehorn CSS positioning into a generalized approach to layout is inefficient. You have to approach this from the perspective of the person writing the check for the development.

A few years ago I contracted to develop and maintain a site for a major hotel chain. We went with a table driven layout; your basic header, body, footer with left/right columns. We also used tables for some of the finer elements like non-graphic buttons. The chain's parent company maintained their own site and went with a pure CSS approach to layout. When IE7 came out our site worked perfectly without any changes. The parent company's site was a mess. Overall they spent about 1000 total hours (between meetings/development/QA/rollout) fixing the issues.

When you are paid to develop a site part of your responsibility is to mitigate against future risk and minimize future development costs, particularly if those costs do not add value to the site (your product).