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CSS vs. Tables

Several years ago it was quite the common practice to use tables for laying out a web page. Since the implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a lot of things have changed regarding the proper way to layout a web page. A new school of thought developed that says that websites should separate the the web page content from the formatting.
As the web evolves, this allows for:

• easier editing of websites since all formatting is contained in one CSS file
• faster loading times due to there being less code
• arguably better search engine optimization because there is less code for spiders to crawl through to get to your content
• compatibility with web-capable devices with smaller screens such as PDAs and phones
• increased ability for allowing users to control their own text size preferences
• increased compatibility with screen readers used by the visual impaired

We recently took the stance that we are not going to design sites using tables for layout purposes any longer. This distiguishes Page Progressive from a lot of other web design companies. We feel that doing our best to comply with new internet technologies is the right way to go.

CSS has come a long way and offers some pretty compelling reasons to ditch the old way of doing things. That does not mean that CSS is free of it's own problems, however. All browsers handle CSS a little differently. Especially older browsers. So that means that we will typically disable style sheets for browsers older than version 5. So your content will remain intact, but people with REALLY old browsers won't get the formatting for your site. Internet Explorer versions before 7 were also very finicky regarding CSS. While it supported most features of CSS, it didn't adhere to the W3C browser compliance standards and therefore rendered CSS a bit differently. So sometimes we have to feed IE browsers different CSS than mozilla-based browsers like Firefox or Netscape.

Here is another pretty good article explaining why it's time to move beyond table-based design:
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/everything.html
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