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 think it all depends on time/effort. While a purist might say "only use tables for tabular data," I've used tables to ease cross-browser layouts in the past.

For me, it's matter of time utilization. I can either spend my time cranking away on the CSS to get it right or I can toss it in a table and spend far less time on it. I tend to go this route until things are up and running. Once the functionality is there, I go back and polish the CSS/HTML.

Answer 2

The benefit of CSS is that it separates design and layout from content.

If you have tabular data then it makes sense to use a <TABLE> tag. If you want to layout different blocks of content then you should use <DIV> or <SPAN> and CSS.

Answer 3

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).

Answer 4

Tables have no equivalent in CSS2, and they aren't that easy to duplicate using css. The particular part of tables that is hard to reproduce is the auto-sizing of the columns. While it's easy to let the 1 row grow to the same size across the page, it's hard for the next row to match up the column size or each cell size dynamically, and in fact can't be done without using other scripting languages such as javascript, php or others. You can use max and min widths, as well as set percentages for cell sizes, or hard code cell width's, but dynamically growing cells work fine for 1 row, it's the next row below it that won't match up.

Answer 5

Seems to depend on what browsers were capable of when you started designing. If you began back when only tables worked then that is what you will probably always want to use, because you know it. Or if that is what you liked to use even after browsers had advanced to be able to render CSS...

I just don't like to keep doing the same things over and over because they are easy and I know how to do them.That is boring. I would much rather learn new techniques than dismiss something because I don't know how to use it or I think I don't have time to learn.

I don't like to use tables, I don't understand them, they seem alien and offensive but that is because I began in 2005. I also don't use design programs to spit out templates because I prefer hand coding.

Answer 6

I believe and hope the era of using tables for layout is gone. Simply put: a table is a table, nothing else.

What I think will be the new, similar, flamewar topic for next few years is : should I use new CSS feature display: table, table-cell, table-row etc. for layout?? ? :-)