Taking Out the Tables on Web Designers

The use of the Internet back when it was first introduced to the public was to pass information, share scientific documents and research papers online. But as it grew, the Internet has expanded from the academic and research world into a media used for a wide sets of purposes including marketing and advertising. The need for the improvement of the visual appearances of website also became apparent. Web designers have sought ways to improve the layout of web pages presented to the end users. One way of organizing and controlling every element found in a websites is through the use of tables and spacers.

The use of tables became popular in web page designing, but also posed several problems. Because of web pages designed with tables nested inside another table have, HTML files became larger which in turn use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting. Furthermore, when a table based layout is linearized, for example when being parsed by a screen reader or a search engine, the resulting order of the content can be somewhat jumbled and confusing. Visit a web designers Philippines site to learn more about tableless web designs.

Editors such as the popular Macromedia Dreamweaver (now Adobe Dreamweaver) that arrived in the 1990s have provided a more convenient and easier way for web designers to design a web page layout. Such editors indirectly encourage extensive use of nested tables to position design elements. As designers edit their documents in these editors, code is added to the document which is sometimes unnecessary. Furthermore, unskilled designers may use tables more than required when using a WYSIWYG editor.

As the dotcom boom receded in 2001 and the Web development industry shrank, coders with more industry experience were in higher demand. In a large number of cases UI development was carried out by coders with greater knowledge of good coding practice. It was around this time that many became critical of messy coding practices and the idea of tableless design began to grow.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web. The term "tableless design implies the use of CSS to position HTML elements on the page but it should be noted that tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. Many experienced HTML coders use CSS to manipulate tables frequently. Learn more about CSS by visiting a Web designers Philippines site.

Advantages of Tableless Websites
There are 3 main advantages why a tableless web design is much more user-efficient than the typical use of tables. These advantages are Accessibility, Bandwidth Efficient, and Maintainability.

Accessibility
As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. It is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page.

Bandwidth Efficient
Using external style sheets to position page elements means more mark up language may be cached and further reduce download times for subsequent pages using the same resources. Poor implementation of tableless design can result in many more lines of code used per page element which can increase download time. Tables have a defined set of rules which are clear and concise while tableless design often involves working around browser inconsistencies.

Maintainability
In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another. For more information about Tableless web designs, its uses and its effective, then visit an online web designers Philippines site to learn more.