Posted by Rob
Posted on 08-19-2008 under CSS/HTML Markup, Development

When it comes to developing an HTML website, there are basically 2 ways to lay out your content if you want it to have any sort of style:  You can use CSS, or you can use Tables (technically you can use frames too, but that’s seriously old-school).  Unfortunately, at some point in the web’s murky past, Tables became quite popular for layout.  Popular, alas, does not equal good.  As far as layout goes, it doesn’t get much messier, inflexible, slow and difficult to update than Table-based layout.

Now, that’s not to say that tables don’t have their place - turns out they are quite good for displaying….you guessed it….Tabular Data!  A cross-reference chart or calendar-type-thing embedded within a page, for example, are much simpler to develop using tables, precisely because of their rigid inflexibility.

So why does this matter to you?  Well, for one, a good way to tell if a web firm is worth it’s stuff is to take a look at their markup on their current websites.  If you right-click in the browser window, you will see an option that says ‘View Source,’ or ‘View Page Source,’ or something along those lines (the verbeage differs from browser to brower.  This is bring up a page full of code.  Look for a tag that looks like this:

if one of the first couple lines below the Body tag looks anything like this:

Well, that’s trouble. On the other hand, if the first couple lines look like this:

You are at least on the right track.

Now, occasionally, table-based layout is just part of dealing with the industry. Sometimes you are dealing with legacy architectures, sites that were developed years ago, or something along those lines.

If you look at a few of a firm’s recent sites, and you see a trend of developing in Tables, it should be a red flag - this is not a firm that is with the times. On the other hand, if you look at a few of their recent sites and you see Divs used for layout, at the very least you know they are using modern layout techniques. This is not to say that CSS-based layout will make a web firm good, but it is pretty safe to say that using Tables for layout makes a web firm not so good.