I guess the title of the post was apt.

You’re mainly proving my point that those who argue in favor of tables usually haven’t spent the time to learn to use block level elements like divs and css well. When you say things like hand coding is a pain it suggests you haven’t taken the time to learn css well. Learning how to use Dreamweaver is not the same as learning to write the code.

designing since 1999 started with dreamweaver, handcoding is a pain and for programmers.
divs are also a pain

Some content here

and

Some content here

ooh tables are so complex, check out the css for that div when its all done

and how painful it is just to align a freakin div on the middle of a page, align text with a image?

users dont give a about codes im all in it for the designs

I still don’t see where I’m hyping anything. I didn’t say things like css is much faster or place any other qualifier on it. I just said they were faster, which you proved. It sounds like I’m being lumped in with other people who are making grand claims. There are many things you can say I do, but hype isn’t one of them.

My point about flexibility isn’t simply flipping columns. HTML tables impose a more rigid structure on the content than a div. A div is a more generic container that doesn’t impose any structure on the content within. A table does.

My bad on missing the context of your statement. This post is framed the way it is, because it’s a reaction to posts framing the topic as html tables are better than css. I didn’t create the overall frame to the conversation. I’m simply adding another piece to it.

I disagree with you that both are techniques with little distinction. That’s why I wrote this post.

I’m glad your process works for you, but that doesn’t change my opinion. My process doesn’t involve spending hours resolving cross-browser compatibility issues by the way. That’s actually where the hype is. I’m not sure why people think it takes a lot of time to get things working cross browser. It doesn’t once you know the one or two places where there could be an issue.

Regarding flexibility, I can see your point about how divs/css can make it possible to flip columns around by only making changes to a css file, and have those changes propagate to many files. My point is that there are other ways to achieve this benefit. In my scenario, I flip the first and second td elements in a .Net master page. It will work equally as well, and only take seconds to accomplish. I agree that you’ve made a case for flexibility, but I don’t think your post demonstrates that divs/css are the best way to attain this flexibility. I believe What’s best in a given scenario depends mostly on the skill set of the person doing the job. But I guess when all you have lying around is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

I thought my question “BTW why ‘css layout over table layout’” was clear from the context but apparently not. So I’ll be more explicit. My question to you is “Why frame this debate in terms
of ‘CSS vs tables’ when it is clear that one can can use CSS techniques with respect to tables as well as divs?” To me, framing the debate this way is yet another attempt to make a distinction
between the 2 techniques when in truth, there is little distinction to be made. Another example of hype at its finest.

LOL, I’m not advocating tables b/c they are infintesimally slower then divs.
I don’t offer any advantage per se, on tables over divs. I do have a very fast development process which involves slicing an image file from my designer, using a tool called Image Splitter. The tool emits old school attribute heavy html tables but I wrote a little javascript parser that seperates things out into clean html and css. The resulting code runs issue free cross browser.
This process allows me to offer fixed price websites without a lot of risk that I’m going to have to eat a lot of hours resolving cross browser compatibility issues. That’s not an argument for tables in general, but it is an argument for me to continue to use tables for my small business clients who won’t pay a lot for a web site, and will not get enough traffic to benefit from div based techniques. I do think there is an advantage for div based techniques for high traffic sites and I will continue to expand my knowledge of div based layouts for this reason.

Also I said speed isn’t the main reason for choosing a css layout over a table-based layout.

The flexibility is in your html structure. It has nothing to do with other tools. When you create a table structure in html it displays a table and your content is wholly dependent on the source order of the code. The same isn’t true if you’re using divs.

Why css layout over table layout? Did you read the post? I wrote it to answer the question.

If you want to use tables go ahead. I’m not going to stop you. However, know that the industry has moved on. Years ago it moved away from tables and towards divs and css for layout. The industry is now moving again toward a responsive design workflow.

Out of curiosity can you offer an advantage of table-based layout over divs and css? Proving that the css layout loads 10ms faster (20ms when I just ran the test on your site) doesn’t exactly endorse using tables instead? It only suggests that the difference in load time isn’t a lot per page. How does it suggest we should use tables?

I think your comments re flexibility and structure have merit assuming the only tools available are html and css. However there are other methods to abstract changes that need to be applied to more then one file into a single file. .Net has master pages and user controls which are ideal for repeating blocks of code. Your 2-column layout example could easily be accomplished with a .Net master page. Even a simple html site can utilize include files for repeating blocks of markup.

I’ll reserve judgment on maintenance but I have a hunch I’ll be able to go in and make the same changes equally as quickly whether I start with the div or table test pages. Maybe I’ll apply changes to my test pages as my home page changes and track the time involved.

BTW why “css layout over table layout”? Both my table and div layouts use css equally.