Regarding flexibility, I can see your point about how divs/css can make it possible to flip columns around by only making changes to a css file, and have those changes propagate to many files. Im going to remain open minded and give CSS a chance! Of course see load times above which now seem to be one signal Google looks at. Thats not meant as a knock against you. Ill reserve judgment on maintenance but I have a hunch Ill be able to go in and make the same changes equally as quickly whether I start with the div or table test pages. Did you read the post? 2. CSS is not hard to learn.The argument is made by people comparing learning something new to learning something they already know well. On the other hand, judicious use of semantically meaningful HTML combined with CSS might confine such changes to the CSS and the pictures used. The easiest way to create a table of contents is to use the built-in I totally thought this debate was long dead, but hid a road block and was procrastinating so I thought I would google random stuff and found this. Any one which have basic knowledge of programming can easily lean JavaScript. IE and Opera supports CSS as different logic. Nice article. Web3. I dont, however agree that the only way to make things work for IE is tables or even that its easier. In addition there are the little seemingly obscure css properties that need to be inserted to make certain things function properly in general, or with older browsers. How is that more maintainable? I did say calling this css vs tables isnt really correct and that its really about tables and divs. Here is the CSS code, so far, through Dreamweaver: As networks improve the speed advantage becomes less meaningful and for a small site its not going to be a big deal either. which is all fine and helpful. This can provide evidence that will back-up a particular choice. If you need a quick salary estimator, that comes out to be about $48.18 per hour. Now I barely have to test my layouts in multiple browsers because Ive learned how to keep them consistent across browsers. Teams. I would never develop the site that way, but I know there are people who can. Granted its not the kind of change youre likely to make, but as an example it shows the greater flexibility and control you have in developing with divs. By Outside of some special occasions you should never have to resize a div or its margin and padding because you updated the text inside of it. I wrote a 2 part tutorial on turning design image into a css layout for another site. The thing is, its not easier because youre using tables. Hi Jennifer. That flow is what needs to be eliminated! This is rubbish. CSS (divs) are better for SEO Search engines dont care one bit if the code behind your page uses tables or divs. Likewise I seem to see a lot of likewise ambiguous clamoring about the change that CSS brings with little reason to change. You Thats not an argument for tables in general, but it is an argument for me to continue to use tables for my small business clients who wont pay a lot for a web site, and will not get enough traffic to benefit from div based techniques. And if I gave offense at all as well I also apologize. In my career I have worked with two types of people, fanatics and realists. If you know what youre doing you might need a few lines of css total to fix IE bugs. With many sites (big, e commerce sites for example) having many different sections of text and images and other media throughout a page the code just grows and grows, taking browsers longer to load page content. I dont think using css for a layout means the page automatically ranks better. For I dont know about you, but generally speaking what my clients want most often is to update the content. Maybe I just havent searched the web enough. I think it gets an unfair rap sometimes. To me, its the most pleasing layout shape. Ive seen a bunch of posts telling me that tables are the old way and other posts telling me tables are the wrong way for page layout, but have heard few good reasons why this is so, at least for small websites. I agree with what you are saying, however I think with the advancement of HTML 5, tables will start to disappear. Styles application means easy Table of Contents generation. I wont restate all the reasons why since I said them in the post already. Those arguments alone should be enough to tip the scales in the argument. I promise Im not laughing. It doesnt lead to the need for more tags and it doesnt require workarounds. Conclusion. Nice post. If you ever visited a page that showed nothing for a few seconds before everything suddenly appeared, that time was likely your browser making its first pass over the table structure behind the page. By using our site, you because both the table and the and elements have separate borders. element: Notice that the table in the examples above have double borders. Versatility: It refers to lots of skills. Thats why theres more than one method in the post. And if you want to use a wysiwyg editor, they just dont work properly anymore in 2019. Even if we accept the argument that learning to use divs is difficult that doesnt make tables a better approach. If I throw out a website which has no padding or un symetrial or miss-aligned text I would be asked to start over. Divs cant do what tables can as simple as that. Youre welcome to send me an email of fill out the contact form and we can talk. Web1. Justin, apparently I named this post well, since the debate never seems to die. Cant be done, we have faux columns but thats really just green screen trickery in doing so. Is there a way I can pay someone to turn this same homepage design into a total CSS design? I mentioned at the start of this post that misinformation spreads on both sides of this debate. I have an unorthodox, perhaps unstandardized approach to web design. Research another option instead of a table for displaying the I speak English fluently. By the way I forgot to mention it when I commented on your post, but I did enjoy reading it. The performance claims Ive read about here and elsewhere on the web for divs over tables are over-hyped I found only a 10 ms advantage for the div technique over the table technique. Its not hard. If your visitors are using IE you need to support IE and whether its the code or the browser that gets things wrong is irrelevant. The separation of content and style makes it easier to adjust pages and styles. Its true that less code means less potential for show stopping errors, but those show stoppers can exist regardless of your sites structure. I know there are workarounds. I typed along with all the code samples and it helped me a lot. Learn more about Teams All you really need to do float the customer service phone number and search form to the right. Where did I say you shouldnt try to make tables with divs? Why css layout over table layout? Theres nothing wrong with how you got here. They make a lot of sense for displaying things like data. And heres what Im referring to you saying in your post: The problem most people have when learning to use divs is trying to force them to act like tables instead of allowing them to be what they are.. Its the kind of thing that might move you from #8 to #7, but not from page 5 to the first page. You can definitely hire someone to create a template for the site if you want. Menu. Im still a little inexperienced to style the whole design in CSS, though. I do have a very fast development process which involves slicing an image file from my designer, using a tool called Image Splitter. First Im glad to see you making the switch. Feel free to contact me if you want me to develop the home page without tables. Odds are youre finding css hard, because youre trying to make it behave as tables do. Im not trying to be political, but when Obama kept repeating change a hundred times a day during his campaign I questioned it because change is not the same as progress. There are also dozens of other methods I didnt mention. Ive been using divs for a decade now and never once had to guess where the content would be. 2) Faster Load Times Because of Lighter Code I remember load times being a major issue when I first got started but it doesnt seem to be the case anymore with so few people on dialup. Artificial intelligence designer salary. I think your comments re flexibility and structure have merit assuming the only tools available are html and css. IE sucks and makes my page look a pile of crap. should be collapsed into a single border: If you only want a border around the table, only specify the border property for CSS, CSS 1 up to CSS3, result in creating of confusion among web browsers. Im not suggesting you should never use an html table anywhere. Same thing with the issue youre having with css. The border-collapse property sets whether the table borders Tables/grids (the shape) are the holy grail of layouts. Yes, but you can get it done just as quickly with css. If I had stopped my study on the first day the table would have won by an equally small margin. Much of the time I dont have to write anything specific for IE. Very informative article and I hope that it gains some traction so people will stop using so many tables for layout. Most of the time when someone presents code showing the complicated css they needed the problem was their general approach. And that, in my view, should be the only thing that qualifies you to comment on the number of passes the browser makes when rendering a page. Everything else is really irrelevant. I think theres more potential for errors with tables, but I know there are people who can code a search friendly site thats still table-driven. In my opinion, combining table layout with CSS works great. designing since 1999 started with dreamweaver, handcoding is a pain and for programmers. I have used css and divs to create multiple lists for a table structure with four side by side columns. WYSIWYG editors seem a lot better to me today than they were 10 years ago. It is easy to customize a web page as it can be done by merely altering a modular file. biscotools.com. Hopefully they can point you in the right direction with your own designs. All the pro-css designers Ive ever worked with have tended to be full of shit, constantly creating new display bugs in production. It looks promising and hopefully will be the way forward from now on, getting rid of both the ugly table and div mess once and for all Id be interested to know what you think of it. Many divs require way too much css to make it worth your while. Its more in how you code it where I dont think html tables are the right approach. Thats not an apples to apples comparison. If you need a table that should span the entire screen (full-width), add width: 100% to the The times when floating blocks are more appropriate to use, besides its original intended use of having text wrap around images, is specifically when the blocks are meant to be independent from one another. CSS has many advantages that enable developers to design a website. Just because you didnt get it working on your site, dont blame css as though you cant build a site that works across browsers. 1. 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