Tables are back baby

Well, sort of. AJaxian wrote a very interesting post about display: table CSS and how after all this time of moving away from table layouts to CSS layouts we are now putting it all into CSS so we can essentially use table layouts again. It’s about time.

We’ve all spent years moving over to CSS layouts and support has gradually been getting better but we still can’t do a lot of basic stuff that you can do with tables without lots of hacks and crazy implementations that shouldn’t be there.

Take for example creating columns. We’re still using faux background images to create the column backgrounds and then putting a clear: both div below everything which shouldn’t really be there in semantic mark-up because it has no meaning, it’s just a CSS hack. These are things we could do with ease using tables.

While I’m on the subject there is also an interesting article on TJK Design about building layouts without using floats, the site being built entirely using lists which degrades beautifully if you turn off CSS.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Tech, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.