Tablesless Web Page

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It is a known fact that for years now, many designers have been trying to find some ways to avoid using tables and spacer images. Why is that? Well, first of all, it makes your code look extensive and bloated, and rather impossible to deal with it after you are done. This is where CSS comes handy. The elusive goal of not using tables in order to make our complex websites was brought much closer to us thanks to CSS positioning. And thankfully, there is no kind of compatibility problem around – meaning that you can rest assured that most of the websites out there, built using those annoying tables can be very easily moved over to a CSS style. Nowadays, CSS positioning is widely accepted, and the better part is that if it shows any effects when running in different browsers, these effects or problems, are most of the times predictable. When using CSS rather than tables to construct a web page you will notice several advantages, I will list some of the most important ones:

• Faster and better coding – In order to accomplish a certain style you will not need to specify lots of attributes throughout the table elements. Instead you will only define them once in your CSS code.
• Lighter markup – Since you will have your style definition in only one place, you will have a much lighter code which of course, will be easier to maintain.

Positioning – put everything where you want it to be

Avoid resorting to tables whenever you can. Remember that tables include lots of elements trapped inside another element and so on, and they are rather cumbersome. If you use other techniques to do a table’s job, you will see that your pages will load faster. This is easy to explain – lighter code, faster load. As easy as that – if the pages have less code to send then the browsers have less code to figure out, therefore it will be more easily understood and it would also be easier to modify for the designer or programmer.

Nowadays one of the most common styles to organize your web page is by using multicolumn layouts. A multicolumn layout is very similar to what you find in newspapers and magazines. Organize your horizontal contents through columns, and your elements such as rules, headlines, but also paragraphs, vertically. As a result of this arrangement you will actually lay out a table without using the actual <table> tag. You will still be using cells to put everything together (every cell will contain a certain paragraph), but you will not be using that tag. Remember why you would use CSS in the first place – because it specialized in described how things should be positioned, and of course, how they should look. You can create styles that describe zones on your page by simply using the position, top and left properties. And this is only a small part of what CSS can do.