Holy cow. I feel like I just hopped into the Delorean and went back in time with Marty McFly. Welcome to the year 2000, kids! Today we’re going to discuss the ginormous amount of shortcomings that using tables for layout poses.

I came across this article via @paulrobertlloyd.

K.I.S.S. means keep it simple stupid and that means tables because tables are simple. And they also work!

Have fun trying to update a tables-based website! Also, have fun with your 10 million lines of HTML, as opposed to my 300 or so. Why is this discussion even going on? Everyone has come to the conclusion that designing with divs is far easier. Aside from the fact that TABLES ARE FOR TABULAR DATA, not layout. They were NEVER designed for page layout. In fact, the web wasn’t even expected to be where it’s at today. I hate how this article tries to teach readers a bunch of shit they discarded ages ago. Hey, that’s cool. If you want to use tables for layout, that’s your prerogative. I’m gonna stick with my realistically simple div-based layout. Thanks anyway.

Tables, at the time, were the only known solution for layout. They were a band-aid. A boat in uncharted waters. And like most things, the div method was discovered, fine-tuned and put into the game because it’s easier. The same applies to CSS. CSS offers global control to a website and gives the designer a better platform to make future website updates on.

It’s one thing to use the regular CSS style to replace the same fonts that will be used all over the place. But it’s another when you take little bits and pieces of code out of the page and bury it some huge .css file and then try to figure out and try to remember where they all came from and what each piece of code did 2 months from no.

What a cop out. “I can’t remember the names I used on my div containers!” Are you actually serious? This entire article screams a bunch of words in my head. The biggest one is “LAZY”. I can go back to a layout I did 3 years ago and only spend about a minute remembering the structure I used. You know why? Because it usually involves about 5 to 6 containers, all named accordingly to what they are. They also require far less markup than your shitty tabular layout. Get out of Dreamweaver Preview mode for once in your life. Go ahead, give it a try. I know the Matrix is a scary world but some day you have to jump in and take the reigns. Just like the thousands of people that did the same and are making beautiful websites because of it.

Let’s take the website that posted this article into consideration. They use inline styles. INLINE STYLES. What happens when it comes time to update the website? Are you going to do a find and replace and pray that it doesn’t bork your entire website? Better make a backup first. Actually, it looks like it was designed back in 1995 so I doubt they ever update their website, other than fill it with articles that are completely irrelevant to today. To top it off, the website is driven on .NET.

I remember setting up a dedicated .NET IIS server. Yeah, I remember how much I fucking HATED every moment of it. Setting up every folder as an application, shoveling through weird errors, pulling all of my hair out. But that’s beside the point. We all know that Microsoft makes EVERYTHING needlessly inefficient and difficult because they feel like they have to hold their ground and use something proprietary. We also know that they never follow any sort of standard, except for their own. This article even covers that. ie, Publisher (absolute crap), Frontpage (complete garbage), Internet Explorer (do I even have to say it?), Silverlight (Flash clone).

The ratio of people who use CSS/div layouts, vs. Table layouts is far unbalanced, unless you’re stuck in 1995, and/or uneducated, and/or just plain lazy, and/or just plain stubborn. I know a few designers that still use tabular layouts. They’re also the same people that use inline styles, NO meta tags, Photoshop’s automatically generated HTML and no alt tags for images.

Let’s be realistic here. The table layout method will never again gain any sort of momentum. It’s done and gone. If people want to continue using it, that’s fine. The only people that will complain are the professionals like myself, who have successfully put the div/CSS method into play for years with flying colors.