Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Design your web layout tableless

What wrong with tables?
If the table widths are not specified, all the text in the table needs to be rendered before the browser can figure out wide to make the various table cells. This means that you cannot see anything until everything in the table is loaded. To make tables more quickly is to specify the widths for all the table columns. But the problem is that your web page cannot be resized to fit the screen.
Remember that tables are only intended for tabular data and do not use them for layouts.

Use CSS for layoutsThe W3C introduced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to enabled the ability to apply styles to HTML documents. Most web designers are only use it to apply simple styles to their HTML, like font type and color, and background colors and images. However, the robust use of CSS for layouts did not have wide-spread occurrence until much later. If coded well, CSS makes it easy to apply global changes to the layout. All browsers today support CSS for controlling layouts (although some browser like IE sometimes requires some CSS hacks).