Why is CSS better than Tables for web design?
Over the course of the past 5 years, a dramatic shift has been made in the web design community. Up until this point, many web designers would rely on the use of HTML tables for creating their layout. Tables would consist of many rows, many columns, and you could get your layout just right by having cells span multiple columns and set column and row widths and heights. Designers could take it farhter by having tables within tables (called nested tables) that once mastered you could really fine tune your design. This was fine and dandy, and ultimately it still works, but it’s definitely not the best.
Here’s the problem - by design, whenever a table is used in a webpage, every browser will not show that table to the user until everything, 100% of what is inside that table has loaded. This means that if your entire layout is composed of one table with the whole pages content within it, or even nested tables, then the user is not going to see anything on the website until the page is 100% loaded.
In the fast paced world we live in, even with super lightning high speed internet, that just won’t cut it.
The answer? CSS. The highlight of CSS is that all of the design code for the whole website can be contained in one “style sheet” file, otherwise known as an external style sheet. Then, every page in the site references this CSS file. Why is this an advantage? Browsers are designed to cache CSS files, meaning they don’t have to re-download them every time a user switches pages. This is GREAT because that means the first time a user visits the site, they behind the scenes download the CSS file, then every page that they go to downloads quicker because they already have the CSS file cached. (It’s also an advantage to the designer because if you need to make a change, edit one file and the whole site is updated!)
The other great advantage? Browsers are designed to show DIV containers progressively, meaning that as the content loads, it is shown to the user. This means a quicker response time, less waiting that the user has to endure, and ultimately a better experience that you can serve your surfers with. CSS - learn it, master it, and your end users will thank you (even if they don’t know it!)
