position: relative;

I’m on a mailing list with a group of professional women designers and developers. There’s lots of conversation flowing and it occasionally turns very lively – as it did yesterday when a member posted about her frustration with CSS and continuing attachment to tables. It ignited a veritable firestorm of commentary! It was fun to read, but it did help me clarify a few reasons that I love CSS and think it’s worth the time of any web professional to learn it. Note I didn’t say ‘master’ it, because I don’t think there are a whole lot of people that can do that, but learning? That’s one of the reasons I’m in this profession, because I like to be challenged.

Anyway here are five things that I think are major advantages of CSS over tables:

1. You can put things where you want them. When I was using tables I used to get so frustrated with having to line things up under the cells above them and split cells into more tables and more cells just to get the layout to work the way I wanted it too. With CSS and absolute positioning, relative positioning and floats, I don’t have to think in advance how I’m going to slice up my design to fit – I can put elements where I want them to go. As a designer this was the key reason I switched to CSS in the first place.
2. Shorter code. Now for a small page it doesn’t make a lot of difference as far as the length of code. But I worked on one client’s site (70+ pages) where every page was full of nested table after nested table after nested table. Cleaning up one of those pages – converting it from tables to CSS – often meant a reduction from 1,000 or more lines of code to 400 or less. Over the entire site, that’s a huge difference. The pages load faster, they take up less room on the server. Not a benefit for SEO, but certainly a big one for users with slower connections.
3. Content first may be better for SEO. With tables, the page is read by the search engine in the order it appears in the code and presented that way on the page. But with CSS and positioning, I can put my big headline and block of content up near the top of the page and drop the navigation, header, sidebar and footer to the bottom. That means that Google gets to the meat of the page right away instead of wading through a lot of code.
4. Easier maintenance. Having rewritten the aforementioned table-based site, I can tell you it can be a nightmare trying to keep track of multiple nested divs on a 1,000-line page. Once the site is converted to CSS, maintaining it (either yourself, your client or another web developer) is so much easier, faster, and cost-efficient.
5. Better for your clients. I firmly believe that not providing a client with clean, well-written code is a big disservice. They’re paying you to be a professional and CSS is a professional’s tool (just one of them, but a key one). When you provide a client with a well-built site that allows them to change the entire look and feel of their website experience with just a little work, rather than a redesign, that’s huge.

I will now step off my little soapbox and slide it back under the table.

I know that learning CSS can be tough; I liked the challenge (one of the reasons I’m in this profession) but I certainly wouldn’t call it intuitive. However, taking the stand that one is not going to learn it because it’s just not that important, that I can’t understand at all.

Tables have their place, for display of tabular data, but they were not intended to be a layout device.