I’m in the midst of customizing the themes for my blogs. Now, if I had oodles of time, I would build my own theme from the ground up. I don’t have a nano-oodle, let alone multiple oodles, so I’m just hacking up the default theme.

No matter how well designed a web application is, it is always hard to step into someone else’s work and make changes that perfectly dovetail the original source. Not impossible, just hard. So, to keep a long story from getting way too long (it is impossible to make a long story short, because it is always too late by the time the thought occurs), I found myself using tables to modify the layouts (gasp!).

Using tables for something other than tabular data is something I avoid, but I do it anyways sometimes. In the case of the theme on this blog, it was a matter of the fastest way to modify an existing layout that I did not design. If I had more time, I’m sure I could have gotten past the bugs that cropped up when I tried modifying the CSS instead. If I had built it myself from the ground up, I could definitly have avoided the table approach because I am careful to avoid redundant classes and I document the things that aren’t glaringly obvious because I know I will forget later if I don’t. But, since neither of these were the case, I used the table. The momentary twinge of guilt passed as soon as I moved on to something else that caught my over-burdened attention. Until I ran across a job posting that stated something to the effect of “If you use tables for layout, do not apply”. Which got the question stuck in my mind “what is the truth about using tables or CSS for layout”?

I’ve been reading about the topic for six or seven years now, so it didn’t surprise me that a search on “tables vs divs” in Google returned  “about 15,400,000” results in 0.41 seconds. What did surprise me was that the first six results were 100% relevant, and that the general consensus of the first ten results agreed with my thoughts on the topic, which are:

• The approach that is the least complicated is preferred over the one that is the most complicated
• The semantic web is yet to come, hopefully will come, and it is better to use CSS for layout than tables when it does get here
• If the layout is overly complex, the semantics will be lost regardless which approach is used
• There is no value in re-writing your code simply to eliminate tables in layouts, while it is valuable to update to CSS if you need to re-write anyway
• The best choice depends on the goal of the page

If this sparks folks to register and comment, I will be happy to elaborate further.