No, this post will definitely not be the final word on the CSS-versus-table debate. But having just burned through a couple of billable hours futzing with a client’s site that was built heavily (and I do mean heavily) with tables, I think I’m in a position to answer this.
Does a site have to be built in CSS? Of course not. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to do anything a specific way online (yet). However, if you don’t take advantage of everything CSS has to offer, you’re almost certainly asking for trouble down the road. Firstly, it’s broadly asserted that tableless CSS is the standard for building an SEO-friendly site. I don’t know if that has necessarily been objectively proven, but a well-built site utilizing CSS removes a good deal of the formatting code and pushes it into an external stylesheet. The result is lighter pages that are easier for the spider to read, as they don’t have to wade through as much code to get to the content. In other words: for optimization purposes, a CSS-heavy site is not a bad way to go.
But more broadly, a site properly built with a good stylesheet is far easier to edit in the future. As mentioned, I just spent two hours applying a variety of requested style changes to a client’s site. It should have taken me, at most, half an hour. The reason it took so long is that the site was a mishmash of external stylesheets, embedded styles, and content within individual table cells that could have easily been formatted with CSS had the designer actually had the training and expertise. Instead, after already having paid to have the site built, the client will now be billed for more work that wouldn”t have been necessary had the site been built properly to start with.
So. Are all tables bad? Of course not. Look closely at F Sharp’s site, and you’ll find a table. Visit StanselJourney.com, and you’ll find another. In some cases, I think designers try to lean a bit too heavily on CSS where tables would be perfectly acceptable. Just use tables for what they were intended–to display tabular data, like numbers, product information or statistics.
The (not really) definitive answer on table-based layouts vs. CSS
No, this post will definitely not be the final word on the CSS-versus-table debate. But having just burned through a couple of billable hours futzing with a client’s site that was built heavily (and I do mean heavily) with tables, I think I’m in a position to answer this.
Does a site have to be built in CSS? Of course not. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to do anything a specific way online (yet). However, if you don’t take advantage of everything CSS has to offer, you’re almost certainly asking for trouble down the road. Firstly, it’s broadly asserted that tableless CSS is the standard for building an SEO-friendly site. I don’t know if that has necessarily been objectively proven, but a well-built site utilizing CSS removes a good deal of the formatting code and pushes it into an external stylesheet. The result is lighter pages that are easier for the spider to read, as they don’t have to wade through as much code to get to the content. In other words: for optimization purposes, a CSS-heavy site is not a bad way to go.
But more broadly, a site properly built with a good stylesheet is far easier to edit in the future. As mentioned, I just spent two hours applying a variety of requested style changes to a client’s site. It should have taken me, at most, half an hour. The reason it took so long is that the site was a mishmash of external stylesheets, embedded styles, and content within individual table cells that could have easily been formatted with CSS had the designer actually had the training and expertise. Instead, after already having paid to have the site built, the client will now be billed for more work that wouldn”t have been necessary had the site been built properly to start with.
So. Are all tables bad? Of course not. Look closely at F Sharp’s site, and you’ll find a table. Visit StanselJourney.com, and you’ll find another. In some cases, I think designers try to lean a bit too heavily on CSS where tables would be perfectly acceptable. Just use tables for what they were intended–to display tabular data, like numbers, product information or statistics.