Historically, tables were always the “defacto” way of building web pages, there just wasn’t any other way, that is, until the Web 2.0 came out. Some claim that Web 2.0 was defined by the ability to do AJAX (XHR) calls while others claim that XHR has always been supported by browsers beginning with Internet Explorer 5. The reality is that, tables are old news, and now considered “Old School” in today’s world of the web.
The question is now, if tables are not an option, what do you do? How do you create a layout and rigid the page? The answer is semantic HTML. Front End developers now rely on “DIVs” and CSS to accomplish a desire layout.
Here is the breakdown of the Client-Side Web 2.0 approach as it stands today:
As the W3C guidelines states, tables should never be used for layout and its only purpose is to display tabular data. This means, a proper page (as shown above) would be the result of a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript (which is not always needed, BTW).
A typical HTML would contain only tags and nothing else, where attributes such as “style=” are forbidden from being used, along with script highjacks such as “a href=”javascript(….”.
Here is a good example:
<html>
<body class="red">
...
Here is a bad example:
<html>
<body style="color: #c00;">
...