Vishal Beersye, Mauritian xhtml web designer & developer

CSS versus tables

Here is a list of reasons why you should choose css styling over tabular structures:

1. Do not mix presentation with contents. Using tables make your page bulky with presentational data scattered here and there. Everytime your visitor has to view a new page, he/she has to download the data for your page afresh.
2. CSS is much easy to use when you have to redesign your webpage. Suppose you have to change the design of a table-designed webiste, what you will have to do is rebuild all your pages again. But with a css powered design, you will only need to modify your style sheet and the job is done.
3. A website should be accessible to anyone and everyone. Tabular structures reduce accessibility for viewers with disabilities even if the designs may look fine on screen.
4. You must take into account that your website is not viewed only on computers, but also on mobile phones and PDAs. These devices will have a very easy to use website if you use a well written css.
5. Have you ever tried looking at nested tables? They are just too complicated. If you use html tables, you should already be knowing that there are 3 levels of indentation even before you try put any content.

More advantages of css over tables

1. CSS file is downloaded just once by your visitor's browser and re-used for different pages on a web site. This optimizes your websites download for your visitor and also the bandwidth used.
2. CSS based layouts are more search engine friendly than table-based ones. Take a look at my websites source code, you will see what i am talking about. I use images only where they are needed. All the styling is done using css, so what a search engine bot will normally consider is my contents.
3. You may use frames to design a flexible layout for your navigation and its positioning, but there's one thing you must consider before you do it. Frames are not much SEO friendly, and is quite an old technology, it isn't of much use today. You can have a much more flexible layout for your navigation by using css.
4. Loading time for tabular structures is much greater than css based templates. As a very simple example, lets take internet in Mauritius. Most of us Mauritians are still using a dial-up connection, the adsl being quite expensive here. When designing a website aimed for Mauritian users, we must take into account this major difference between tables and css.