Benefits of tableless design
Posted on 31st October 2007 in CSS, Open Standards | 3 Comments »
To emphasize greater use of Cascading Style Sheets — there are few very good reasons to dump endless HTML table structures in favour of CSS.
Tableless design (or layout) is a design technique that leaves out HTML tables and uses CSS to arrange elements on a web page.
To illustrate the point let’s introduce 2 different samples of fluid 3-column design: tables vs tableless.
Visually there’s absolutely no difference. Yet technically speaking, for this very simple page in structure, you can spot a 5-line difference and approximately 200 bytes in favour of tableless design. That leads us to the benefits:
Bandwidth & rendering
Tableless design means less bandwidth. If you link in a CSS file, a browser will cache it on 1st load of a page and on further navigation only page structure itself is being downloaded. In addition to traffic cuts it significantly reduces page latency as well.
Accessibility
Prioritizing Cascading Style Sheets will also ease the process of porting a site to various platforms, e.g. mobile phones, handhelds, etc. or usage, e.g. printing. Not to mention making the site reachable for a screen reader or braille device.
Maintenance
With CSS site layout is kept apart from its structure and is centralized. That makes site design a lot easier to change. For example changing 1 single digit in CSS may increase or decrease font size of an headline on each and every page of a site.
CSS is a reusable resource as opposed to the inline definitions of HTML.
And for all tableless developers there are badges you can add to a site to indicate its quality:
3 Responses
Here in the UK, I would take a rough guess that around about 5%, if that of new sites are developed without tables (except for tabular data). Dreamweaver is the favorite tool of professional web agencies here.
I’m afraid it’s about the same everywhere. My prediction would be that while there are around 10 active W3C-compliant developers in Estonia, the number of developers capable of tableless design falls somewhere near that 5% you estimated for the websites in UK.
For those who would admit it, 80% of modern design time is taken up by cursing and spending all day trying to fix a bug that would make your site not work well in some browser like I.E and maybe trying to fix that broken or tag and actually spending about 10% of actual time doing the real job. I gave up on tables completely at least 2 years ago and much as I know many web developers use them, I would encourage them to move on, the benefits are worth it.