Tables
Posted by Michael Dale on Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:41 PMIn recent years there has been a shift from table based layout to using CSS. Finally people are realising that tables are not meant for layout.
The concept of using CSS is to separate content from formatting. This allows for a greater audience. Such as people who use screen readers or those browsing via a mobile phone. CSS has a nice way of "falling back" if the device doesn't support it.
With html you are also given the meta tag "media" for use within the style tag. This allows you to define what CSS style will be use for a certain device, i.e screen, print or handheld.
The World Wide Web Consortium states that
Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.
Now although we are moving away from tables they still have a use. Tabular data. Tables should really only be used for this. An example is in this post.
So by all means use tables, but please use them for their intended purpose.
ables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.
World Wide Web Consortium bothered putting that up because many people use tables due to the lack of CSS support in IE.
BTW M$$ regulary donate to WW3 to keep them quite about how bad the support for CSS with IE. BUT, IE7 beta may have good CSS support. We shall soon find out soon. ;) Maybe tab browsing as well.
AMEN to that.