A lot of people with handicaps know that.
Good point, but not a lot of webmasters know that and not even some pro designers.
Having recently recovered from the land of the blind, I can tell you it's a real challenge and the table sites on mobile devices we're virtually useless for me at that point.
I suspect the value of this thread has been exhausted.
Yes, I think it's run it's course but I'll give it one final round so we can get it out of our system and stop beating the topic any time someone mentions tables for layouts in other threads. We should just tell them how to do it and if you want to give them the benefit of divs vs. tables, drop a link to this thread which says it all.
Tables vs. Divs is like Code vs. Pepsi, Coke vs. New Coke, McD's vs. Burger King, Radio Shack vs. Apple, IBM vs. Apple, Windows vs. Apple. Windows vs. Linux. It gets a lot of people polarized on both sides of the coin in a hurry mainly because it's a choice and we all like to think our choices are best and will argue to the death why one is right and the other is wrong. Always good fun over a couple of beers in a bar but sadly most can never have their opinions changed no matter
Like I said above, I did tables for layout and even shipped a product that created websites using table layouts because in '96 era that's all you had for positioning on a page and tables have been forever ruined.
Some of my old table layout sites still exist today without upgrading the template and there's nothing wrong with that, it ain't broke, and I don't have a problem with anyone that still builds them because that's all they know how to build.
There was even a product called
NetObjects Fusion [netobjects.com] which only did tabular layouts that were so nested it was almost impossible to edit their pages by hand. I even wrote a plug-in for Fusion in Java around '97, blah. The pages Fusion put out even drove some other page editors to the brink and they crashed trying to edit those wacky pages forcing you to use Notepad, VI or some other archaic tools.
However, this is 2014 and that was 18 year old technology. Today we use responsive web design for meeting the needs of all our devices and that's kind of where table layouts fall apart. Sure you can make a table respond to the screen size and I have been doing that since you could set width and height with percentages instead of pixels. I always advocated fluid design over fixed which was typically 800px wide for many years and made my 24" monitor mostly blank space. Took quite a few years for people to catch up to the majority finally using 24" monitors before those old defaults fell by the wayside. Sadly, the tendency to use fixed width still was an issue and the reverse happened, sites didn't work well on my netbook, tablet, phone, etc.
That's the beauty of divs vs tables. You can easily move a div to a new location so divs can be side by side on 24" or stacked on a smart phone. Compare that to the table which, unless you completely redesign the page for a different device size, will still be the same table even if it fluidly scales.
There's just no logic to building the old way these days. WordPress themes and/or Twitter Bootstrap, or BootPress themes as these are often called, are the way most go these days which is why threads like this give me pause as I don't find them valid as it's not real world unless you're building a site for a computer museum that has to work on some ancient version of Netscape at which point I'd recommend getting a copy of Fusion and have at it.
Like I said, build whatever you want, I don't care as I've done it all, but the old methods aren't prudent for the current mobile generation.
It makes no sense.
Remember, Google's #1 recommendation for dealing with mobile devices is responsive web design:
[
developers.google.com...]
Hope we've gotten it all out of our system.
Final comments welcome.
