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Old Skool Webdesigners Rejoice: Tables are BACK!

Written on 22nd October 2008 8 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I used to teach HTML. My favorite part of the workshop was always explaining tables. They seemed so incredibly difficult until you understood their logic. Then it would all become clear. Loved the look on peoples faces when they (hand coded) their first complex Table Layout.

Then CSS came and suddenly Tables were out of fashion. CSS and “Float:Left” ruined my life. I used to be the “King of Tables”! Now I’m nobody, an outcast, a ‘Table’ guy. Other designers laugh behind my back.

Not anymore!

Digital Web Magazine has an excellent in depth article about CSS TAbles support titled “Everything you know about CSS is wrong“:

“When released, Internet Explorer 8 will support many new values for the CSS display property, including the table-related values: table, table-row, and table-cell—and it’s the last major browser to come on board with this support. This event will mark the end of complex CSS layout techniques, and will be the final nail in the coffin of using HTML tables for layout. Finally, producing table-like grid layouts using CSS will be quick and easy.”

Oh yeah, I’m back!

8 Comments »

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

8 comments/trackbacks to “Old Skool Webdesigners Rejoice: Tables are BACK!”

Mar 17, 2009: karlus (Carlos Andrade)
oh and btw… tables are back! :) http://tinyurl.com/anr8zc

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By André Luís on Oct 22, 2008

Whoa… hold your horses. You’ll still have to degrade gracefully for IE < 8. At least for a long while. ;)

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By Roy Tomeij on Oct 22, 2008

@”Oh yeah, I’m back!”
Only if you learn to use CSS to mimic tables ;) One might wonder why you would want to mimic a table though… if you need to do that you probably just want to use a real table.

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By Joost Elfering on Oct 22, 2008

@Roy Tomeij
the problem with using real tables is that it is a accessibility issue. as the word says, tables are meant for table content. basically text browsers can’t handle them properly and blind people have a lot of issues with them.

the idea that a div has some of the main behaviors of a table is really nice and indeeds makes the some stuff easier to do. BUT do remember that we’re not done with IE6 and IE7 yet as they are both still a big part of the Internet traffic suppliers. therefor this way of using HTML and CSS will have to wait for at least a year or 2.

@all
personally… i’m used to the way that div’s with float:left behave (like wrapping of div’s and scaling options). i have not tested the new CSS display:table option yet so i do not know the actual similarities to it’s HTML counterpart. so i have not a complete view of how this will affect any of the new way of designing, but i do think this might be have some benefit’s over the “new” old way of doing things.

i do need to stress that IE6 and IE7 made an average of 48.6% (W3C statistics) last September. so changing you site now will displease a lot of people that try to visite your new and improved site. that is more then FireFox use that was to 42.6% last September.

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By Jack on Oct 22, 2008

My main concern is the layout for so many different devices: blackberrys, ipods, and now androids. Not to forget different screen sizes and resolutions. Oh did I forget browsers! Some browser makers sell their own web design software and have no interest in being w3c compliant. So as a designer you must be flexible.

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By Bram Kok on Oct 25, 2008

haha

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By andrezero on Mar 17, 2009

I’m sorry to break in with the wrong attitude here, but you must have poked my eye or something… it hurts.

In short: using tables for positioning is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Tables and rows and cells are totally non-semantic markup. In order to use tables as a positioning mechanism you need to have your content ordered by the merge and span rules. Separation of content and presentation is not a trend and is not optional. It is a web-standard and it is now 12 years old! It allows you to style and reposition elements without messing around with markup… argh!!! I could go on forever…

So going back to tables just renders modern SEO techniques useless, destroys usability and accessibility and is a step into template management mayhem.

So “complex css techniques” is the problem!? Ignorance is… you should have learned something in the past 12 years, but apparently not enough.

I’m glad that “old skool web-designers” don’t teach “html” anymore, actually their still in good time to go back to school themselves.

/rant

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By andrezero on Mar 17, 2009

my previous comment/rant my be misread.. I understand the author’s post refers to table-ish css properties and not hardcoded html element tags.

My criticism goes towards the old school “tabular logic layout” and that is what the author claims to be back.

I don’t believe these new properties will ever be used to build a whole layout. They could eventually substitute some otherwise “complex css techniques” used to precisely position details in your layout… or not, since the problem there is that css is not uniformly supported by major browsers in the first place.

So, reading my comment again, please replace “tables” with “table-logic”.. as in:

“in order to use table-logic as a positioning mechanism you need to have your content ordered by the merge and span rules”

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