webprutser - 10:49 pm on May 18, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's a pity, though understandable, that the discussion was moved. Some arguments were discussed on an other page yet.

As stated on the other page, I don't care what tables were meant for originally. If they are a good tool, I'll be happy to use them. Since I read about the idea that tables should no longer be used for designing websites (only use them when you have data that should be put in a table), I'd like to know why, before I say goodbye to tables for this purpose.

I use tables to position my elements and CSS to add styling. There are <p>'s in my tables, as well as an <ul>'s.
My code is no mess, no nested tables, easy to read, etc. I see many table-less-websites on the internet with loads of <div>'s that are complete puzzles to me. The reason why I still use tables is my experiences with trying to put the elements at the right place. I get the most exotic results without tables.
I postponed diving into this problem and meanwhile was getting doubts about the necessity of doing so. Why not leave things as they were?
I want to see if I can find a good reason to choose for table-less lay-out in future and that's why I'm interested in this discussion.

I found a first argument in rocknbil's comment:
"a page reader will expect tabular data in a tabled layout and it leads to very confusing interpretation of your page because it reads across the column in rows".
That sounds logic to me. You could wonder how many of your visitors use page readers, on the other hand why not make things as easy as possible for those few visitors who do.

Loading times of tables ... what differences are we talking about? Significant?