If they want to tweak something in the design, again, piece of cake to do. All the pro-css designers Ive ever worked with have tended to be full of shit, constantly creating new display bugs in production. 1. 4. I wrote it to answer the question. I have used css and divs to create multiple lists for a table structure with four side by side columns. I find that if I have to spend more than a 5 hours trying to figure out the combination of CSS statements to achieve the result I want on just one page, and I can do it in a table (a VERY SIMPLE table), in less than 15 minutes, then the dream of CSS has not been achieved yet. Not doing something because it takes time to learn is laziness.. Different browsers rendered the design differently. I think you hit the nail right on the head with this comment. Four-fifths of the way through an assessable project isnt the best time to have to redo a table-based layout. Style adjustment is more convenient. A few years ago I wrote a post on how to create a 2 column layout with css. If I tired to reply to your comment in Spanish it would take me hours, even days, to put together a few coherent sentences. acknowledge that you have read and understood our, Data Structure & Algorithm Classes (Live), Data Structures & Algorithms in JavaScript, Data Structure & Algorithm-Self Paced(C++/JAVA), Full Stack Development with React & Node JS(Live), Android App Development with Kotlin(Live), Python Backend Development with Django(Live), DevOps Engineering - Planning to Production, GATE CS Original Papers and Official Keys, ISRO CS Original Papers and Official Keys, ISRO CS Syllabus for Scientist/Engineer Exam, Interview Preparation For Software Developers. Odds are though they would look at every data point they could so I would think a slower server would mean potentially worse ranking. As far as I know Ive never provided 100% of the code to any of the sites youve developed, which would mean the issue isnt necessarily my code. between the 2 techniques when in truth, there is little distinction to be made. Calm down. They impose a more rigid structure than divs. Why css layout over table layout? These must all be on the same horizontal line to work, and if one has a word or two text change, only that column will flow properly, and I have to do lots of editing of the other columns. Dont worry Im not taking your questions as a need to defend css. I am in the middle of a major project that we tried to code with proper CSS, but its incredibly frustrating and time consuming. If you send me a link Ill be happy to take a look. I hope that helps answer some of the questions. Developers need to realize that its okay to use tables when you have to display data and you need to use divs when you have to create layouts. Do I have to have a separate div for each line? Take the time to learn how to use it. The easiest way to create a table of contents is to use the built-in My question to you is Why frame this debate in terms WebYou can have as many rows as you like in a table; just make sure that the number of cells are the same in each row. With the 4 methods youve got the only that really comes close is the last & it requires more code. To suggest that the purpose of divs is to use block rendering contradicts the argument that tags should have semantic meaning and not display meaning. A square peg and a round hole can both be perfect examples of each and yet not work well together. That is true, but you can have all your presentation in a separate css file while having a table-based structure to your html. I thought my question BTW why css layout over table layout' was clear from the context but apparently not. After-all the 3 column layout with equal height is referred to as the holy-grail in css, enough said! Sure you can say they just need to learn more, but sorry, they didnt. There are some new things on the way with css3 too that will make working with divs/css even easier and more flexible. With Googles latest algorithm update (Caffeine) emphasising page load times as a SE ranking factor it is now more important than ever from an SEO stand point to reduce the amount of code on a webpage. Im amazed that in 2013 people are still defending table-based layouts, but whatever. Oddly as grids become more and more in use theyre sometimes developed in a way that attempts to recreate a table using css. What I will say though is that every person Ive ever met who was equally capable at using both css and tables chooses to use css. The key issue is not to use tables for the layout of your site template. (10-20 is most common.) I hope this will show some good ways to the others. At first its confusing since its such a different approach, but once you make it through the learning curve its obvious that the div/css combination is a much better and more flexible approach to building sites. I do understand your point. Believe me, Im not making the argument for convoluted nested tables with colspan settings, etc, nor am I arguing against semantically correct documents. Very interesting information. 3. Its huge. If you look at the source code of most sites (especially the ones you like) youll discover that most and nearly all use css for page layout. Home. designing since 1999 started with dreamweaver, handcoding is a pain and for programmers. BTW why css layout over table layout? Using CSS, you will control the color of the text, the design of fonts, the spacing between paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid out, etc. I still dont see where Im hyping anything. and how painful it is just to align a freakin div on the middle of a page, align text with a image? The algorithms used for ranking most often are content and inbound links. If I misinterpreted that I apologize. Then I format the text in CSS adding padding and margins where needed. The third problem with tables is in how browsers render them. Much of using css for layout is realizing that you dont need to do as much as you think. Tables are simply not faster to create. I really like your saying Not doing something because it takes time to learn is laziness. Ive been a designer for over 20 years and been using tables for layout for 13 years. If youre having to spend the vast majority of your time finding workarounds for IE then youve probably been doing something wrong. Return on Investment 4. It doesnt once you know the one or two places where there could be an issue. This is simply not a point I am willing to debate. Thats not meant as a knock against you. Divs are more flexible. Getting back to IE, the 3rd method you used with negative margins comes close but once again special considerations need to be taken with IE for this design, and yeah its not the fault of css but IE, however when the majority of your target audience maybe using this browser its important it works properly hence the use of tables which may result in more ugly looking code unfortunately but it is just one of the requirements until microsoft clean their act up. Your text should reflow with changes. WebCSS is clearly preferable in cases where presentational markup and CSS support the same kind of design, no one in their right mind would argue that font-tags are better than Youll have more control over how your page displays with divs that can aid in how a screenreader sees your content, but again you can create equally accessible pages using either approach. When using CSS for layout, browsers can cache 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. Nah, i disagree.. if im the only one whos going to work with the site, i go for tables, its 1000x faster and easier to get a decent layout. Two common formats are: Key-Value pairs fast read and write but Read the post to find out why. I think not. The columns of a newspaper are used to guide the reader along the layout. When I first started learning css I did run into problems making things work cross browser. Some might argue that the content search engines see on the page is more important and through divs its easier to present a different order of content to visitors and search engine spiders. If you have a high volume site, it might be a good reason to consider using divs. Im not sure why people think it takes a lot of time to get things working cross browser. Regardless the table div comparison above is not accurate. If you want to report an error, or if you want to make a suggestion, do not hesitate to send us an e-mail: W3Schools is optimized for learning and training. The rest is a necessary evil to get the design into the medium. Tutorials, references, and examples are constantly reviewed to avoid errors, but we cannot warrant full correctness of all content. Luckily, modern sites have actually become pretty basic. Like I said the debate the wont die. Believe me, the clean code you talk about it gone. 1) Inconsistent Browser Support Different browsers will render CSS layout differently as a result of browser bugs or lack of support for various CSS features. Discover the best hard disk format for your Mac! I agree your point of view. Divs are like blocks that stick together when near each other, but with a little pull you can separate them and do something else with them. of CSS vs tables when it is clear that one can can use CSS techniques with respect to tables as well as divs? To me, framing the debate this way is yet another attempt to make a distinction It takes some practice, but its really much easier than you might think. I typed along with all the code samples and it helped me a lot. I think youre asking legitimate questions and Ill do my best to answer. A div-based layout is: easier to maintain less code and less For Row height is select Exactly from the dropdown. I have used table-based layouts for a few years and have started using css to mainly style text. The one that continues using tables is because it does not dominate or does not know CSS. CSS is very useful for styles regardless of how you do the layout. No matter how many times I see this question or people making an argument on behalf of their opinion, the technical answer remains the same. The web developers need to test for compatibility, running the program across multiple browsers. The limiting factor isnt the language itself, its your current skill with the language. By a few I mean less than 5. The phone number and search can either be wrapped together in another div thats floated to the right or they could each be floated to the right independently. We needed three sets of tags to present some content as opposed to the one set of div tags. Not something you need for a two column layout of course. Unless you offer specifics Im going to assume youre just name calling, because you were unhappy with my previous comment. Youre mainly proving my point that those who argue in favor of tables usually havent spent the time to learn to use block level elements like divs and css well. Im not going to tell you that youre doing anything wrong or evil or that the world is going to come to an end. I had not heard about this controversy, being a WYSIWYG kind of guy. Thats why theres more than one method in the post. I hope I wasnt coming across as bashing tables. 4) Separation of Style and Content I guess this one is related #1, ease of updating? In the best case scenario youd be adding at least another table cell to get another block of information compared to adding another div for another block of information, which would grow our code equally. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I also believe the opposite, theres no point using table rendering if you DO want them to be independent. True. My process doesnt involve spending hours resolving cross-browser compatibility issues by the way. any pretty crap i use css on those parts alone. Then, I can see how they styled it in the source code. Google is now using load times as a factor for ranking and no matter how fast your site loads if its slower than the next one its going to be perceived as slow. Im surprised this debate continues, though admittedly Im continuing it right now after the question was raised on my small business forum. Even that doesnt work when they are not all exactly the same font size with no flow. I dont think the choice is about shape though. There are many things you can say I do, but hype isnt one of them. Most of the time though, that relationship wont be 1:1. users dont give a about codes im all in it for the designs. However, I dont think thats the main reason to choose a css layout over a table-based layout. The border-collapse property sets whether the table borders Maybe you want to move the sidebar from the left to the right of the content. Web1. I really like using CSS for formatting text, lists, positioning, etc. John Taylor This is one of those debates that never seems to go away and I guess Im not exactly doing my part to make it go away with this post. If youre not creating HTML e-mails, or unless you have some overriding need to have part of your page scale because of the amount of content on other parts of your page, theres no reason to use tables for layout. WebJavaScript advantages Fast speed: JavaScript is executed on the client side thats why it is very fast. The greater flexibility you can create with your structure and the maintenance advantages are the more important reasons. Ive been doing web design since the beginning of the internet as a hobby and now professionally and I like a combination of both worlds. If you click through on some of the links in the post or just do a search for css vs tables youll come across a lot of the reasoning why some prefer tables. Thanks Kevin. According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary for an AI designer in the US as of July 7, 2022, is $100,224. Whats the difference? I promise Im not laughing. It might not be that one line of css is off, but more that the way that part of the page is structured in general could be done differently. And then discover that I forgot a somewhere and nothing lines up with the adjacent cells. No one is going to stop you. This is one of the reasons why there are people who prefer tables instead of using this kind of trickery and black magic to fake the appearance of what tables can do without all the extreme measures. 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. Just change the template file. Thanks Emma. Both Fixed and Variable database extents can only be larger than 2 GB when largefiles are enabled with an Enterprise Database license, the OS is enabled for largefiles and user quota/limits allow. Its usually one or two things that may cause a problem and those problems are easily fixed. I show this above in the post. For a complete newbie I would agree tables are easier to understand though tables do trip a lot of newbies up too. To remove double borders, take a look at the example below. 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. It sounds like youre good about keeping your code clean, but more code means more chances for error. With equal column heights, yes its easier to create them with tables than with divs alone, though if you look at the last of the 4 methods I described youll see its not hard to create them with divs and css and it still uses less code than using tables. Ive done that for people before. There might be cross-browser issues while using CSS. Lets see if we can dispel a few myths from each side. Having developed and worked on sites both ways Im 100% certain structuring your layout with tables is not the way to go. Table layout; Multiple-column layout; Each technique has its uses, advantages, and disadvantages. My primary UI guy is a CSS ideologue and spends half his time fighting with stylesheets to make it work in every browser. I use it and love it. Each technique has its uses, advantages, and disadvantages, and no technique is designed to be used in isolation. CSS has many advantages that enable developers to design a website. Tables/grids (the shape) are the holy grail of layouts. Nice presentation by the way. html. The first thing we need to do is sort out the spacing/layout default table styling is so cramped! The only people who suggest that are those that havent learned how to layout a site with css. In its simplest form were comparing: Even in the simplest case above you can see tables are already a more complex structure than divs. I cant tell any discernable speed difference between a table layout and a CSS layouts load time. My bad on missing the context of your statement. No its not rubbish. 1. Here are a couple of posts I wrote for another site to give you an idea my thought process on developing sites. CSS based design is unquestionably superior to table layout, but due to sheer laziness the practice of table design has held on. If you need to create a modern site that supports an older browser, CSS imposes huge costs. I dont offer any advantage per se, on tables over divs. more flexible since one div is not dependent on the other divs on the page it allows for more freedom in your design, quicker to load blocks of code can be presented right away instead of the browser requiring an extra pass. How to check which tab is active using Material UI ? You make the assumption that because it takes you 5 hours to develop a layout in css that its the same for other people. Really? My point is that there are other ways to achieve this benefit. Tables should be used when a bunch of blocks need to depend on each other, like maintain the same height, or to cooperate in filling their parents width. My guess as to why they didnt learn it as well as you is because its actually not intuitive as you say, especially when trying to implement a grid shape with 3 independent blocks. Having used both its very obvious to me that the div based approach is the much better way to go. Just for the entirety of your layout. Yet every few months someone else pops in here to tell me why Im clueless and to argue in favor of table-based layout. I believe many developers only read do not use tables, missing the later half of the sentence for layouts. Graphics are easier in CSS3, thus making it easy to make the site appealing. Maybe its because I learned with tables when I was getting started but Divs are complicated and they absolutely do require more code most of the time when you consider practically each object needs to be assigned an ID and go along with a class . I guess Ive never been convinced of the seo benefits. The more professional sites are *usually* built using div/css scripting and now table cells as most sites require absolute positioned content which most sites are not using. The limit isnt the language, its your current skill level in using the language. Whats wrong with using css to make divs or other tags act like tables for layout if you want your layout to LOOK like a table (again, the holy grail look that most clients love). There is no drag and drop anymore. I have a business subscription with them. Divs require less code and are less dependent on each other than tables. How to Play and Pause CSS Animations using CSS Custom Properties ? Your tutorials are really only half-done and stop at the parts where css begins breaks down. So Ill be more explicit. I came to web design by way of VB. But clearly there are many people who support using tables. I dont think anyone is arguing in favor of html attributes. Your logo image can either be a background image on the header div thats not repeated or a regular image inside the div. Tables and grids are not the same thing in web development. I guarantee I can develop a page with divs quicker than you can develop it with tables. Your probably right about round pegs and square holes, and I am sorry if you took offence, but the fact that countless people have these issues with css must indicate a lack of continuety with css. Which CSS framework is better Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap ? I would never develop the site that way, but I know there are people who can. Q&A for work. Here is the CSS code, so far, through Dreamweaver: On one hand you say you can create 3 columns of equal heights with divs, but in your blog post, you mentioned that people shouldnt try to make tables with divs. Im not going to stop you. Covering popular subjects like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL, Java, and I still dont know specifically which tutorials you mean, but I dont think Ive written a tutorial that offered the complete code for a website. 1) Easier Site-Wide Changes CSS proponents claim site-wide changes are easier with CSS because you change one file and boom, it changes on all pages. Let me also add Im talking about using tables and nested tables for the entire layout of a site. divs vs tables RIGHT! No one is saying that a div can do more than a table. Unless you view the source code, it isnt always obvious how a coder puts together a page. I dont agree with their reasoning, but it is there. CSS handles the design and feel a part of an internet page. Any one which have basic knowledge of programming can easily lean JavaScript. .Net has master pages and user controls which are ideal for repeating blocks of code. But some things can be said about the style of a website. I wrote a 2 part tutorial on turning design image into a css layout for another site. The key is understanding that you dont really have to do as much as you think. It could mean one less page they get to crawl on your site. In my scenario, I flip the first and second td elements in a .Net master page. Im not sure who angered you so much, but please dont take it out on me. They dont need a lot of fancy features or tons of content. A paragraph? There are many databases with different data formats to choose for an application. With browsers having different defaults paddings, etc. Thanks for this. One argument the css side always uses is that having your presentation in a separate file makes the site easy to maintain. I agree with what you are saying, however I think with the advancement of HTML 5, tables will start to disappear. Again its probably not a huge difference either way at this point. External style sheets have some tremendous advantages: You can define the style sheet in one document and have all the HTML files refer to the CSS file. Also the css is alot harder to understand than it would be with a simple table layout. Itll probably be a week or two before I have the time to really look, but if you email me the code I will look. If you were to point one out to me Id either fix it or explain why it might not be working for you and probably even help you make it work. If you arent its not because of the language. The argument is about how to structure a web page. This debate is mainly from those who code by hand I would think. Separate of style and structure is less about whether or not you use css or tables. However, you can build a great site using tables and a poor site using css. Use table-layout: fixed to create a But now not only is the solution more convoluted with containers i.e the complexity in code grows proportionally with the amount of columns compared to a simple table but we still dont really have equal length columns as its only the containers that are equal length and not the content/sidebar divs themselves. 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 industry is now moving again toward a responsive design workflow. This post isnt a tutorial so I would need to know which one or ones youre referring to as well. Very amusing. 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. 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. Is there a way I can pay someone to turn this same homepage design into a total CSS design? Ie then youve probably been doing something because it does not know css truth, is. Your tutorials are really only half-done and stop at the parts where css begins breaks.. An idea my thought process on developing sites your saying not doing because... Want them to be independent would mean potentially worse ranking algorithms used for most... 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