Tableless design has became one of the main requirements in web design during the past 2 years. Templates based on tables are now considered of a lesser value, unless they exhibit extra ordinary abilities of the designer.
Some of the professional coder can¡¯t even imagine going back to the stone age when site¡¯s navigation was not based on CSS and the structure relied on incompatible with most browsers table. Making a tableless template is a lot harder, especially if you want it to pass validation, but the question is, does it worth the hassle?
Let¡¯s try to go on its disadvantages first. The main and the biggest problem that I have encountered while coding tableless templates for others, is that you cannot edit it in WYSIWYG such as DreamWeaver. That¡¯s a one big minus I¡¯d say, especially for those who advanced from Notepad. The problem is, the divisions are unable to ¡°organize¡± themselves in the same order as in the browser and as a result you see an absolutely messed up page on your Visual Editor and need to refresh the browser and see how each change effects the design.
The second inconvenience (to say the least) is that as most of you know - tableless design is functioning only based on the CSS. Therefore, if you are not fluent enough with Cascading Style Sheet, you are unlikely to get your head around it, modify the template, let alone build one yourself. Basically, you need to be very good with coding, modern coding, in order to produce a well laid out, functional design.
Still and all, there are some advantages as well. For example, tableless design, displays the same in all the browsers, and all Operating Systems. No colour differences or variations in spaces, widths and heights. Moreover, since it¡¯s based on one CSS file which controls the entire website, as a result the pages load faster.
In the end, it¡¯s up to you, weather you want to go into all this hassle of creating a tableless layout or not. It¡¯s modern, new and very ¡°web 2.0¡å, but should take twice more time to produce.
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