Guided Miss-Aisle

tag. If ever anyone needed a basic book on web development, it was this designer - ten years ago this might have been an acceptable design and layout solution, but it's little short of criminal for a practising web designer to serve up outdated practice like this to a paying client. Exactly why it was done this way remains a mystery, although I strongly suspect ignorance and a lack of interest.

A few years ago, the quarrel over whether to use tables or CSS for layout was settled conclusively in favour of CSS, whose theoretical advantages had been crystal clear for a long time: more compact XHTML pages are easier to index and more accessible, plus you can completely change a site's appearance merely by editing one CSS file and leaving the XHTML untouched. The problem arose from the tardiness of the browser vendors in properly supporting CSS. No-one wanted to duplicate every site, once for users of modern browsers and again for the sizable minority of Netscape and IE5 users, so tabular layouts retained the practical advantage of working for everyone. This excuse, however, has ceased to be valid for some time.

In fact, the last browser you could make this excuse for was IE5.5, and looking at January's server logs for www.passyourtheory.co.uk, I see that accounted for 0.03% of all visitors and Netscape 0.01%, while IE6, 7 and 8 dominate and account for 79%, with Firefox on 17%, Safari 3% and Chrome less than 1%. IE6 may implement CSS less than perfectly, but it does it well enough to negate any argument in favour of tables. So why then do the current editions of almost all books aimed at beginners include a chapter on table-based layouts? Some of them even attempt to justify themselves by outlining the "advantages" of this approach, including the quite breathtaking assertion that tables are "much easier to learn and manipulate than CSS rules". Have you ever looked at the Source View of a complex table-based website? Could you make any sense of it? No, me neither.

As someone who's been developing training materials for 20 years now, it offends me when newcomers to our profession who've paid good money for a foundation in web design and development are immediately led off in the wrong direction. Not only do they have to learn all this nonsense about tags, tables and the rest of that old junk we used to use to make our web pages more interesting, but they're going to have to unlearn all of it again once they realise (if they ever do) that it isn't the way good designers and developers do things nowadays. Tables are designed for containing tabular data and that's it. There's very occasionally part of a layout that can only be practically realised using a table, but such instances are rare and should be a last resort.