html - DIVs vs. TABLEs a rebuttal please

Question

There are lots of people out there asking "why shouldn't we use tables for structuring our HTML" and while a lot of answers come in, I rarely see anyone being converted to the world of semantics. That said, I've yet to see any convincing rebuttals to support the rationale for why we should (or might) use tables.

Anyone care to offer a rationale for when tables are valid structural markup?

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Nov 7, 2008

Considering that this question didn't go away like I thought it would, I suppose I'd better clarify my question and explain its existence.

Through frustration having read the "tables are easier" argument once too many times following the "DIVs vs. TABLEs" question I wanted to expose the question a little more and not let the table lovers get let off the hook so easily.

Each to their own others might say, but I'm forever being given some application to put on our sites that's been created by some 'tables are easier' developer that dumps a chunk of crappy HTML into my pages, and to be honest, I'm just not seeing enough of the table lovers listening to the arguments.

Anyone use Mambo back in the day? Anyone had to take a bash at putting a design on the top of Microsoft's Sharepoint? Having to fight your way through all that nested table crap was hell, and considering that it was written by some bloody good coders annoys the heck out of me. Reasonable semantic markup has been around for long enough that there should be no reason for developers to still be championing "tables are easier". Tables are not easier - they are lazy!

My question deserved the negative rep for the negative manner in which it was presented, but I'm still waiting for people to accept that the only reason they use tables is because THEY DON'T KNOW HTML. Because if they did, then they'd understand, as jjrv says, that tables are for tabular data.

Answer 1

Tables are valid when you have a table of data. I've seen interactive grid widgets where they go out of their way to use a bunch of divs to avoid the dreaded table tag. When it's tabular data, make it a table.

A more controversial view of mine is that when you have problems dealing with vertical layout issues in CSS, you can just use a table and often resolve it immediately. Not as pretty as it ought to be perhaps, mixing content with presentation, but it gets the job done and avoids CSS hacks to get around IE.