Getting Rid Of Tables In Your Web Design

If you are a student web designer, or, a small business owner looking to DIY your site this is an important topic you can’t ignore. Designers had this debate of table or not to table for a long time. You must understand that fact that most of HTML based web design of past has been done using tables, rows, columns, ( think <tr>, <td> <div>) . What many designers started out of frustration became a standard way of designing websites. And its came to be known as, cascading style sheets or CSS. This became popular as table-less web design.

Knowing CSS

CSS has been around for ages. However, it only became a standard a few year ago. Some savvy designers who wanted to make web design more accessible and semantic primarily introduced it in 1996. At that time most sites relied heavily upon tables in HTML.

One of the main reasons why CSS wasn’t in vogue back then was because not a lot of designers knew how to convert a PSD to CSS. It was easier to convert a PSD to HTML but not a lot of guys were adept with CSS coding. Also, lot of browsers back then didn’t know how to read CSS. So a lot of webpages were rendered useless due to the use of CSS.

With greater understanding of CSS coding and greater acceptability of CSS by search engines and browsers. With more complex sites it became increasingly difficult for tabled HTML designs to cope up. Tables simply can’t handle bigger and complex sites. Call it desperation or new knowledge CSS became a new norm.

Why Use CSS as Opposed to Tables

CSS started out with a greater accessibility feature for the web. It basically allows more people to surf the web by presenting content in a way that allows a wider variety of computers, browsers, OS, and users to access sites.

Another great advantage is saving time, space, and bandwidth. For example, to use a heading in H1 size on 100 pages across the site, HTML will use <H1> tag on all those 100 pages where that heading is required. CSS only specifies that once in one file called the stylesheet. Neat, isn’t it!  That’s just one element, imagine the amount of time and space used using the stylesheet.

Another great benefit of using CSS instead of tables is that maintaining a site becomes a lot easier. As all the style files of a site are located at one place rather than everywhere as in tables, it’s just a matter of changing elements in one file.

CSS started out as an accessibility feature. That means that less-abled users, such as, visibly challenged people, can also access CSS sites on their Braille devices.

Overall CSS is eth way forward and definitely a step ahead of tables in HTML.

Victor Solovey has been in the design business for a long time. He can’t stand ugly and inaccessible websites. His motto in life now is to design beautiful yet effective sites. Victor can be contacted to do psd to xhtml conversions quickly.