top 10 reasons to use CSS for positioning over tables

[beakertrail]

I have to convince a project manager of CSS for positioning over tables.

What are the main reasons for and against this argument?

[Longhaired Genius]

You "have to" or you "want to"? My reasons include: less code so faster download, code easier to maintain, more elegant and just more fun. But if I wasn't in a position to decide for myself, I'd just do as I was told.

[skube]

Try looking at Why Tables for Layout is Stupid [hotdesign.com]

It is easy to follow and brings up some main points.

cheers,
s¦<ube

[website]

that is a worthy link

[HughMungus]

Thanks skube. Someone has been prodding me to switch to CSS and I haven't really bothered with it until now.

[wrgvt]

I have several web sites and have converted some to CSS layout and left some done with a tables layout. I used to read these reasons for converting to CSS layout and I really couldn't see the advantage to it, especially after reading all the problems with differences between IE, Firefox, and Opera.

One of my sites, though, was getting out of hand. It was about 700 pages and most pages were built with a series of nested tables. Any particular page would be updated several times a year, usually requiring some minor, but confusing, change to the nested tables. So I took a few weeks to learn CSS layout and started a temporary redesign on the side. Once I worked through all the browswer issues and had a basic layout, I changed just a few pages on the site. I found that the pages loaded quicker and I found maintaining and updating them a piece of cake. I bit the bullet and redesigned every page on the site. Keeping this site up to date and adding new pages takes a lot less time for me.

My next most popular site works well with a tabular layout. Everything is basically kept in vertical table columns and it's easy to update and add new pages. It's less than 100 pages, so if I wanted to redesign it, it wouldn't be a huge deal. The only time I think about having to redesign it is when I look at it with Internet Explorer. I've been spoiled by Firefox. I bring up one of the pages in Firefox and it loads quickly, especially the text, with the images loading last. When I look at the page in Explorer, it's much slower. So I wonder if redoing these pages in CSS would make Explorer render the pages quicker enough to make it worth the effort.

[Eddie73]

Document Structure
Tables force the typical structure of a web page (top down) to the designers settings. This is a potential accessibility problem and even search engines have to wade through the layout to get to the content.

Bandwidth
A cached CSS and Strict Doctype web page delivers a much lighter website overall and enhances the viewing experience.

Business Savings
A designer can turn up, wash their brush across the photoshop canvas then add the images to a single stylesheet. Try re-imaging a 300 page table based layout.

Search Engine Benefits
More content, less code means search engines like your site more. A spider has to crunch your site and there's nothing worse than cracking a coconut to get to a mouldy core. Give them what they want, keep layout in a CSS.

Accessibility
More devices, platforms, browsers and other web agents can consume the content far more effectively.

Could go on and on but I'm gonna make a coffee.

[Bowdii]

skube - Great link mate, I just sent it to my boss;)

[JAB Creations]

<b>Standards Compliance</b>
You could possibly argue that everything is moving towards XML/XHTML. If your site is rendered in quirks mode because of crappy code then browsers choose how to render your sites FOR you. I'm sure if two browsers did not agree on something in quirks mode that your boss wouldn't be happy if the site looked differently or bad in one browser contrasting another.