Figo told me that his boss asked him to use tableless design on the web development. He also told me that it is because in the age of Web 2.0, everyone is using DIV and Pure CSS to design. I quickly asked him to view www.google.com page source and see:
Even Google is using Table! I’m not going to say more to spoil my manners, I just wish to redress a bit on Table using. (I wonder why so many die hard designers insisting to use DIV only)
Table is the most stable way to represent frame and data. In ASP and ASP.NET, table is one of the most important layout after datagrid. Table will save a lot of codes. Basic, easy and clean.
IMHP, the best practice is to use table to frame your web page structure and use DIV for dynamic content like repeating data field or Client Side Control fields (Java Script for example).
DIV cannot easily be rendered properly in different Browsers and versions if you do not mastered the coding perfectly. I remember one Pure CSS design website: CSS ZEN Garden where bunch of die hard people using css and div to code the website templates that ended out to be a failure project (hardly update already).
Improper way of coding using pure DIV will only resulted more codes and more time to render by the browser. I’ve seen so many people wasted their valuable time just to adjusting the little layout rendering problem between different browsers…yet I see so many lazy programmer throwing over 10 tables in a simple layout that can use one or two DIV to achieve the same result.
IMO, It’s a fight between Designer and Programmer’s Mind. People blog a lot on how a designer should know about SEO and Programming but I hardly see any Programmers concerning the Human, the Sentimental Part of a website, design.
Afterall, people read words, see picture and enjoy surfing. Here’s a nice designer blog which programmers should visit and get some inspiration on it: Web Designer Wall