Using tables instead of div’s

Code February 2, 2008

CSS literature teaches you all about tossing away the abundance and abuse of TABLES - of course they are to be used when true tables are called for - and to use DIV’s instead.

If you like clean code, you’ll love the theory of this approach: it is wonderful to separate CONTENT from DESIGN. Instead of a convoluted mess of stacked tables of an unbelievable accumulation - if possible filled on top of that with a horrendous amount of FONT and other styling tags - you only see basic structure and content when reading through HTML.

You’ll love this idea exactly as long as you have straightforward clients who do not change major design decisions at every bend of the road and you have projects alloted a decent amount of time with no expectation to make users of outdated browsers happy and don’t even have to worry about IE5 but allow you to pour your creativity into browsers that adhere to the W3C standards.

But all hell breaks lose when thrown into the fast lane and you suddenly have to accommodate quirky requests, and either the client or the programmer in the background think they have drunk design knowledge and good taste with their mother’s milk.

Unfortunately projects can be far from ideal, and sometimes the job just has to be done, no matter what , within a time frame that makes anyone cringe who has ever been involved in a major team project which did not have as much cost but much rather quality and outcome as the most important goal (for example the birth of a new Corporate Identity for a major company which involves months of work from a large group of people).

Here you are, and you need to complete a new website - have it up and running, built from scratch, including design, media preparation, production work, hand code 10 pages filled to the brim with tables and image popups, with linked PDF manuals that have to be prepared. And don’t forget the time it takes to accommodate several client changes and new ideas that come along the way… and all of this you need to do within 18 hours as this is exactly what your boss allocated for it being done.

A setup like this does barely allow for any fine tuning and definitely gives no room to experiment with something new. If you are lucky, your client will love the first design idea you bring to the table, but even then you struggle with every given minute.

This is the moment of decision.

In a moment like this it’s going to be beauty and correctness versus speed and the past, proven to get the job done, approach.

It is hard to admit, but yes, in situations like this I have chosen the easier way and decided to use TABLES as a rough design grid over DIV’s, knowing that it will work without any worries. It saved my butt at the time but not my conscious.

What would you do?