Web Design Discussion - Table-less css

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Table-less css

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Category: General Discussion
Forum Name: Web Design Discussion
Forum Description: Discussion on web design and development subjects.
URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=14689
Printed Date: 29 March 2026 at 10:14am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Table-less css

Posted By: huwnet
Subject: Table-less css
Date Posted: 14 April 2005 at 1:21pm

I am thinking of rewriting my site so that it is tableless.

However is it actually worth it? Confused

And which renders faster tables or no tables?

Replies:

Posted By: dfrancis
Date Posted: 14 April 2005 at 1:42pm

It is easier to validate and make accessible however, I truly feel it's more trouble than it's worth. You would be better off validating your tables and images to comply with current standards. (IMO)

I've been playing with it a little and I do think I will be implementing CSS themes over the skinning examples I have seen. (See http://www.cssZenGarden.com - http://www.cssZenGarden.com for some great examples.)

I would like to make an accessible forum at least to the US Government 508 standards but that would take a lot of work. The main thing is alt tags, closing tags and table summaries from what I can tell.

As far as the performance issue... I dunno. Though if it takes a 50K CSS include to accomplish the same as three lines of table tags, I would have to conclude the answer is no... CSS is not "better" in that respect.

PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.

References:

http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/accessibilityxm.aspx - http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/accessibilityxm.aspx

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ - http://www.w3.org/WAI/

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

http://validator.w3.org/ - http://validator.w3.org/

Posted By: dj air
Date Posted: 16 April 2005 at 7:04am

also you have the issues of

users that turn CSS off,
people that have a custom style set within the settings area (for example people who need things enlarged)
also the matter that cross browser compatiblity will be an issue

im on sure on performance side of things. but i myself will be sticking with table layouts at the moment.

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 16 April 2005 at 2:50pm

On the other hand...

50k of CSS is about 40-45k to much. You need to redo the CSS - lol. Anyway, it just downloads once for your entire site and after that it's pulled from the browser cache. Meanwhile, the html pages are smaller.
Some browsers don't render a table as it downloads. The user has a blank area until the entire thing has been downloaded.
You can embed asp within in your css so you can query cookies or browser info to customize the presentation for each user.
Way more people turn javascript off than CSS.
People that have a custom syle setting need a custon stlye setting. It's either use their setting or loose the viewer. Can't tell you how many sites I leave because they insist on using a fixed small font like 10pt/10px which renders like bug sh*t on my 1200x1600 screen. px and pt are for print - not for screens with variable sizes. Use % or em units for font size.

(My personal syle sheet however will override any page - regardless of if they use css or not).

There's about 5-6 things to remember for x-browser capability. Most of them have to do with IE's broken implementation of the box model.

90+% of sites use one of a half dozen basic layouts. Tons of CSS layout templates to choose from.

Initial coding and making modifications in CSS is just plain faster once you know what you're doing.

Bottom line is - tables are for tabular data, css is for layout and presentation. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing effort though. Try using an HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and start by creating a few paragraph, header and div styles to handle font size, color, and alignment, yet keep your table layout. As you get to be more familiar with css, you can get into the positional elements and they'll make more sense.

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: C.P.A.
Date Posted: 26 April 2005 at 10:17am

I think it is worth it! I've recently build a website specially for people suffering disabilities, and you really would please them by doing so. However, whenever you need to use a table to provide tablized content you should use a table but note to declear <th> for the headers and <td> for normal cells.

Also I high recommend learning CSS in depth because it will take a lot of work out of your hands when working with it in a clever way.

Good luck!

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C.P.A. � The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities warmly welcome you.

Posted By: ngaisteve1
Date Posted: 27 April 2005 at 10:15pm

For me, I have been using css to replace tables. Yes, it takes a lot of times to do so but it is worth it at the end because after using css to replace table, I save up so much un-needed code from using tables (nested) and my code now is lesser and also more readable (after took out all those nested tables). Because it is more readable, it eases my future maintainance.

Posted By: C.P.A.
Date Posted: 27 April 2005 at 10:24pm

and when one works with clever asp programming at the background it really is not that much effort at all on the long term side of advantages, so I agree with mgaisteve1

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C.P.A. � The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities warmly welcome you.

Posted By: ngaisteve1
Date Posted: 28 April 2005 at 1:04am

dpyers wrote:

On the other hand...

50k of CSS is about 40-45k to much. You need to redo the CSS - lol. Anyway, it just downloads once for your entire site and after that it's pulled from the browser cache. Meanwhile, the html pages are smaller.

For me, one of my application, the css file is just 1.33 Kb and another one is 4 Kb.