Tables design is the web design which uses HTML tables to design a page layout and control processes.
Instead of tables then emerged a new style sheet language CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Use: These languages or to e particular this language was then utilized to arrange page elements and text on the web page.
Introduction to CSS: World Wide Web Consortium introduced CSS language which was utilized to improve accessibility to web and to make the HTML code much more semantic than presentational.
Advent of CSS: when CSS web design was introduced several web developers discovered it a lot less difficult to use. They considered the formatting through CSS really easy, infact they considered the tag to be obsolete in reference to table’s web design. Earlier CSS had very limited and difficult to use layout capabilities but now the times have changed and now CSS ahs improved a lot with many common page layouts specially its 3-column design.
Since 2006 CSS has improved considerably but still there are particular websites which use tables for layout and CSS for text formatting only.
Tables vs. CSS:
- Accessibility: the layouts in tables are actually far better over CSS due to the fact if you want to open your PDF files in your mobile phones then it becomes required that they are accessible and tables allow them to be accessible on mobiles also.
- Implementation: clever implementation of tableless design is able to produce web pages with much less of HTML tags which will allow the user to download pages simply from the web.
- When it comes to tableless designs then if any changes are to be made, it is then less complicated in your CSS design to change them rather than changing in table’s web design. This is infact a hard job.
- It happens that in some browsers CSS does not get full support and hence the downloading can be incomplete. This happens particularly in the case of NETSCAPE 4 software, where CSS downloading is a dilemma.