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Tables vs Tableless layouts?

Thread title: Tables vs Tableless layouts?
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02-09-2005, 02:10 PM
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DateinaDash is offline DateinaDash
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  Old  Tables vs Tableless layouts?

What are the benefits of using tableless layouts when it comes to designing a website for a client?

02-09-2005, 03:37 PM
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CreativeLogic is offline CreativeLogic
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I've personally never saw the point of designing a layout without tables. You can do so much more in my opinion with a table and helps later down the road.

02-09-2005, 03:55 PM
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Bazza` is offline Bazza`
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its a compatability thing, i think alot of newer browsers prefer tableless coding so thats the main reason as far as i can see. . .

02-09-2005, 03:59 PM
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jamesyfx is offline jamesyfx
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It's just... an advantage if you build your site in a certain way.

Doing it for the sake of things is pointless though.

02-09-2005, 05:00 PM
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kiswa is offline kiswa
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If you want to be technical about it... according to the W3C (accepted standards despite what others may say) tables are to be used for tabular data. Layout should not even exist within (X)HTML (theoretically), it should all be semantic markup for the structure and content of a document. All design and layout should be handled by Cascading StyleSheets.

If you don't want to go with the 'standards', then your site will be less accessible to older, newer, text-based, and voice-read browsers. It's worth learning how to use CSS to style, and to write valid (and semantic) markup for your content. It will guarantee that your site will work with future standards compliant browsers, just as well as it works now. It's also a hell of a lot easier to update a site where the styling is in one (or a few) styelsheet(s). You just change the stylesheets and you have a whole new site with the same content.

Hope that was helpful.

02-09-2005, 05:10 PM
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  Old

Tableless, it pays much better ^_^

And also, 'Tableless vs Tables' is like 'CSS vs Font tag'.
Explanation: The font tag has been replaced by CSS, this way you can change all the text styles on your page through one file, the same happens when you use divs, you can adjust the container div's wide and your whole website will get wider/smaller/fluid.

02-09-2005, 05:45 PM
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derek lapp is offline derek lapp
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the reason for it is, people suck at designing websites. if you look at code for a lot of ebsites, it's filled with tag upon tag of useless useless cells. i blame the people who are too lazy to learn a simple mark up language and rely on image ready and the sliceing tool to do everything for them -- it's like getting a blind man to do it: cells and images are made where they don't need to be. optimization is terrible. plus, you wouldn't use tables to design a business report, so why do it here?

the benefit is, it only loads what it has to load. you can make a fairly complex design with only a couple divs if you know what you're doing.

02-09-2005, 06:16 PM
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lightofmind is offline lightofmind
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http://www.webstandards.org/learn/re..._business.html

A selection from the above linked article:


Clarity and conciseness

Sites based on the so-called "old-school" design methods use a lot of intricate tables and transparent images whose code is mixed with the actual content, and thus are transmitted with each page. On a standards-compliant Web site, the presentation can be sent once, using one or more style sheets that are cached by the browser. Separated from the presentation, the mark-up of the content is more concise. The volume of data transmitted over the network is therefore smaller, which has two immediate advantages: pages render faster on browsers; and the bandwidth requirement (a very costly item) is lowered. Conciseness also has a positive impact on the quality of the code; it becomes easier to maintain.

The actual savings will be different in each case; it depends, among other reasons, on the following:

- the level of optimization of the initial code. The less the initial site was optimized (in terms of file size vs. percentage of useful content), the more significant the savings will be.

- the type of traffic received. A site that receives 80% of the total traffic on its home page (the most common scenario on Internet sites and portals), the savings will be less than a site with more distributed traffic. This is because the presentation information (CSS) is only loaded once along with the first page. A company applying the same presentation to all its intranet sites would see a significant reduction in bandwidth and, consequently, in its network infrastructure costs. This will be of particular interest to the IT director, who is always under pressure to reduce costs!

In the case of ESPN (which recently adopted Web standards), the savings include 50% reduction of page weight to 50kb — with 40 M page views per day, this translates to a saving of 2 TB/day, 61 TB/month and 730 TB/year. Take your ISP contract, your Web statistics, and do the math.

02-09-2005, 08:38 PM
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derek lapp is offline derek lapp
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technically speaking, if you know what you're doing, you can style a table dlayout hevily with css, so all it has to do is render the table and it's couple cells, so you're not saving that much.

of course, this refers to the situation where css hasn't bee completely optimized, such as having 2 columns each a different colour, be the same height in appearence - having the shorter column span the taller's height (without the use of graphics).

02-10-2005, 01:40 AM
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This article is worth a read:
Throwing Tables Out the Window

I created some sites using no tables at all but because it's quite hard to get it looking exactly as you'd like I went back to using a few tables (just to help the layout stick). I still use CSS to style the sites.

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