Chapter 3: Tables are Evil?

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Overview

Say what? When did using tables become an act of pure evil? Certainly one of the biggest myths of building a site with web standards is that you should never use a table. Ever. That you should avoid them like the plague, seal them up, and place them on a dusty shelf like an artifact of the web development days of old.

Where did the distaste come from? It probably began innocently enough, with at least good intentions from the start. Many have been rightfully preaching the benefits of tossing out conventional nested table and spacer GIF layouts and replacing them with lean, structured markup and CSS for presentation. We may have tossed out the peeler with the peelings though, with some touting the banishment of tables in general—for any situation.

We'll tackle CSS layouts and all the benefits they produce later on in the book, but let's focus right now on using tables for situations where they are appropriate—namely for marking up tabular data. We'll figure out a few simple things we can do to make our data tables more accessible and stylish.

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