For those of you not familiar with the years old debate of CSS layouts versus table-based website design, here’s a quick recap. Tables, which are the same rows and column-based ones you use in your word-processing program, have been a staple in website design since the dawn of web pages. They are a quick and easy, accurate, and browser-compliant way to lay out items on a web page. Then came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which sought to separate the design of a page from the content, so that style, design and layout changes could be made by simply editing the CSS file, making website design updates relatively simple, unlike the old method of having to change each table-based layout to the new design. Plus, the code was far simpler.

So the debate began. Some designers jumped into the “I love CSS” camp, others the “I’ll stick with tables until CSS is totally cross-browser compliant” camp. Here we are, several years later and the debate rages on. CSS is still not 100% browser compliant (thanks to the bane of most designers’ existence: IE), but people still don’t want to rely on tables when CSS makes things so much easier to stylize.

Having been knee deep in both situations, there’s no doubt in my mind that the best course of action is still a healthy combo of both CSS stylization and old-fashioned table layouts. Basic table layouts guarantee cross-browser compatibility, while CSS makes site-wide styles very easy to update and control. Until IE gets its act together with CSS, it’s probably the only way to maintain the accuracy of how your site is displayed.

I’m also finding that a lot of clients like to be able to maintain their own websites without the need for developing a database-driven Content Management System, which are great but can be costly versus simple static HTML sites. I had mentioned Adobe Contribute in another post, and Contribute works best with a good combo of tables and CSS, so that’s another reason I can hand a site off to a client and trust that they should not have any problems maintaining it themselves…

I’d love to hear other designers’ experiences, one way or the other.. What is your opinion of the CSS vs. Tables debate?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Design, How-To, Web-wise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.