TalkPHP - View Single Post - i'm happy to say im going back with designing with some tables

Wildhoney · 02-12-2009, 11:52 PM

Redesigns are easier and less expensive
I do the coding myself, and whilst I am fully able to construct an entire website in CSS, and using tables only for their rightful purpose for tabular data, I find modifying tables to be much easier. That's of course a personal preference and therefore one which I'm unable to argue for.

Bandwidth ain't free
Maybe so, but bandwidth is somewhat abundant these days. The hosting costs are going to be the same for me tomorrow if I switch to purely CSS, as they are today with tables. I don't see how they can make a claim on the bandwidth costs because adding "float" and "overflow" to CSS documents surely makes up for the use of "table", "tr" and "td" for HTML tables, and that's ignoring the other CSS code required to target a specific element. As long as you're not stupid and have tables inside of tables inside of tables.

Hey, these pages all look like each other!
Well, of course I still use CSS to maintain looks. That isn't the argument here. I can format a table the same across every single page using CSS, and when I change it in CSS, it changes globally. This, I feel, is a worthless point.

Write once, use anywhere, for everyone
I don't have much knowledge in this area. I would feel, however, in terms of support for various screen types and browsers, HTML tables is the most compatible. I say that without any such proof though, and so I'm unable to argue convincingly again this point. I've designed websites for browsers before, and for that I configure a sub-domain specifically for mobile devices and code them to a much lower screen resolution.

Google is blind
Sure. Google isn't quite that blind. Google's job as a search engine is to judge a website based on relevancy to a user's query. It's job isn't to be particular over how a webmaster has constructed the website. SEO is a whole new arena, and whilst non-tables may perform slightly better because of the way tables are displayed in HTML, it's marginal. I have several websites that rank very well for some competitive keywords that are coded using HTML tables. One of which is the keyword "cheats" and that website is on page one. Again, their argument here is unconvincing. The amount of time I save coding into HTML, I can concentrate on parts of the website that truly do count towards SEO.

You can still use tables if you need to, just don't use so many of them
Well, quite. My point exactly. What was I arguing for?

A note on the constant mentioning of spacer images though, that's quite silly, in my opinion, because you don't have central control over it. CSS should definitely be used for the looks because then it is all centralised. I feel CSS needs to be more powerful though. I cannot wait for the future versions of CSS where I can do things such as look ahead and look behind, as with regular expressions. That's going to be a while before that gets fully supported, however!

02-12-2009, 11:52 PM	#9 (permalink)
Wildhoney La Vida es Sueño Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Oldham Posts: 2,280 Thanks: 90	Redesigns are easier and less expensive I do the coding myself, and whilst I am fully able to construct an entire website in CSS, and using tables only for their rightful purpose for tabular data, I find modifying tables to be much easier. That's of course a personal preference and therefore one which I'm unable to argue for. Bandwidth ain't free Maybe so, but bandwidth is somewhat abundant these days. The hosting costs are going to be the same for me tomorrow if I switch to purely CSS, as they are today with tables. I don't see how they can make a claim on the bandwidth costs because adding "float" and "overflow" to CSS documents surely makes up for the use of "table", "tr" and "td" for HTML tables, and that's ignoring the other CSS code required to target a specific element. As long as you're not stupid and have tables inside of tables inside of tables. Hey, these pages all look like each other! Well, of course I still use CSS to maintain looks. That isn't the argument here. I can format a table the same across every single page using CSS, and when I change it in CSS, it changes globally. This, I feel, is a worthless point. Write once, use anywhere, for everyone I don't have much knowledge in this area. I would feel, however, in terms of support for various screen types and browsers, HTML tables is the most compatible. I say that without any such proof though, and so I'm unable to argue convincingly again this point. I've designed websites for browsers before, and for that I configure a sub-domain specifically for mobile devices and code them to a much lower screen resolution. Google is blind Sure. Google isn't quite that blind. Google's job as a search engine is to judge a website based on relevancy to a user's query. It's job isn't to be particular over how a webmaster has constructed the website. SEO is a whole new arena, and whilst non-tables may perform slightly better because of the way tables are displayed in HTML, it's marginal. I have several websites that rank very well for some competitive keywords that are coded using HTML tables. One of which is the keyword "cheats" and that website is on page one. Again, their argument here is unconvincing. The amount of time I save coding into HTML, I can concentrate on parts of the website that truly do count towards SEO. You can still use tables if you need to, just don't use so many of them Well, quite. My point exactly. What was I arguing for? A note on the constant mentioning of spacer images though, that's quite silly, in my opinion, because you don't have central control over it. CSS should definitely be used for the looks because then it is all centralised. I feel CSS needs to be more powerful though. I cannot wait for the future versions of CSS where I can do things such as look ahead and look behind, as with regular expressions. That's going to be a while before that gets fully supported, however! __________________ The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. Last edited by Wildhoney : 02-13-2009 at 04:09 PM.