Has CSS Killed the Tables in Web Design ?

A lot of young designers these days can’t think beyond CSS when t comes to styling their websites. Style.css has become an inherent part of all website files. But have you ever wondered what existed, and in some places still does, before CSS became the norm? Well, most of you would have heard of tables in HTML. Yes, tables were the only way to structure and organize contents in webpages in HTML. Even though CSS was introduced in 1996 it only recently became a standard practice. Tables make a webpage heavy with all those extra tags. Heavy site loads slow and a lot of modern browsers do not like tables.

CSS made websites quick and modern. CSS is a more accessible choice for those concerned about wider exposure of their content. Not only is it fresh ad modern it does come with a lot bells and whistles. Let’s fond out more about how and what exactly CSS affects.

Technical Side

CSS is simply a stylesheet that’s a common style defined for an entire website. For example, if you want your H1 to be grey instead of black and font size 55 you don’t have to go and do that in every page H1 is used. Just mention it once in your stylesheet and you are good to go. This shortens the length of your on-page code by a mile. Think about it. Short codes, less clutter, less bytes, lighter pages result- fast loading.

Design Side

Use of one common stylesheet instead of different tags across the site makes for a consistent and coherent design. We all have seen sites using ( a lot of times by accident) different fonts on different pages. That’s because they have to define font every time they use it. Mistakes can be made easily. CSS handles that well by defining all the constants once. This helps in designing more complex sites quickly without worrying too much about the style elements coming in the way.

Server Bandwidth

As e have already mentioned above that lighter site loads faster that’s because it has less files to load. This results in saving a lot of bandwidth. Another way bandwidth is saved because CSS is loaded once as opposed to tables, which are loaded again and again for each page.

So the overall verdict is that CSS has in fact killed the use of tables in webdesign and very rightly so. CSS gives a more consistent, light, coherent and accessible web design, which is also very easy to manage and edit.

Victor Solovey  has seen a lot of changes in web design industry over the years. He works as a senior designer and believes in making web a more effective cyberspace.  Victor can be contacted to do psd to xhtml conversions quickly.