I wish I'd learned html using them from the start. There are a lot of things you can almost do with tables, but not quite. They're great for highly structured data, but divs aren't as rigid, and can do things I just got used to thinking were impossible.

I've been wanting photo galleries that are "springy," but thought keeping the thumbnails and the captions was something tables would be suited for. Turns out fixed-width divs works so much better for this!

Still needs work, but this page sizes fairly well to the browser window:

http://forrestcroce.com/Galleries/All.html

Whereas the rest of the galleries I haven't updated yet ( try Seattle ) are stuck at three columns, and really only display well at one particular window size. Probably a lot of people here have already given up on tables as a layout tool, but this is pretty exciting (to me at least).

I have to agree, although I am only just beginning to use div's for layout. Although when I re-sized the photo's, which by the way look great. When the number of columns got down to 3 columns, they wrapped so that the 4th row of photos started under the menu. I had the same problem on one of my page's, but did not get the time to sort it out. I think you may need to put a container div for all the photo div's.

Regards

my sites ranks well in search engine when i code my site into a table less design using DIV and pure CSS! I have a large number of uniques a day!

Glad we have a CSS convert !!

So true. I too love css layout. But, I am still stuck doing fixed width designs. I don't know why. They just seem comfortable to me after using tables for so long. I need to work on making things liquid.

I would say CSS beats tables any day - but it does take a while to get your head round it!

I have not been able to get consistent results though with divs across browsers. It seems that sometimes IE will display divs in the tabular format that I want, but I switch to Firefox and I find myself having to add line breaks to get the divs into position.

In fact, I recently used the Zen theme from Drupal for a couple Drupal-based sites, and had to convert it to using tables because the divs just weren't getting it done.

It seems that sometimes IE will display divs in the tabular format that I want, but I switch to Firefox and I find myself having to add line breaks to get the divs into position.

Then you are not using your CSS or your layout effectively - yet. Sounds like you just need to learn more. Your first mistake is laying out anything using IE first. Because of IE's broken box model, numerous float and other bugs, it's just NOT the best tool to use. Use FF or Opera, or even Safari to design your site, then go back in and kick IE into submission with the fixes needed for 6 and below.

You'll never get absolutely pixel-perfect results between browsers, but I rarely have any problem with a consistent look.

Forrest glad you see the benefit of css over tables and you are right that if you have tabular data then you would use a table for it.

Rick I want to echo what LadynRed said. Develop for FF or Opera first and then tweak things for IE. If you develop to the standards at the start it becomes somewhat trivial to make things work for IE.

The other way around is much harder to do and leads to you having to tweak your tweaks if that makes sense.

I never got the hang of tables properly but got taught about CSS from the start. I see the principle but I lack practise!

I agree -- CSS is far better for tables, and alot more; therefore agreeing with LadynRed and vangogh ... "hand-code" your site(s) so they validate in FF and Opera first; MicroSTOOPID IE just hasn't caught up to current standards and is falling rapidly behind, even though writing the correct code for your site to show properly in IE can sometimes be a daunting task at best.

Jim hang in there and keep practicing. It'll come. Most of css is pretty easy. There are a few stumbling blocks along the way, but if you keep at it you'll get past them.

I learned html by getting thrown to the wolves in ASP, working on pages with table based layouts. After a while, it seemed like that's just how things were done.

Also, the markup is a lot simpler, for the most part. ( Photo frames laid out with <img src="x" style="background-image:url(y)" alt="z"> are a pain, but a small price on the whole. ) You can actually read it and easily understand at a glance what's going on, without nested tables, row/col -span, and lots of other tags.

I'm using Notepad++ ( open source, and very good ) for a lot of my development lately. Dreamweaver wrote a lot of unnecessary code, although it's still great for making changes to a nav bar across a whole site.

I just coded my first table-less site. And it feels great! I use php header/footer files and css. Updating is easy!

Any stats on how fast you can update a site with a PHP header, footer & navbar laid out in CSS?

I agree, xhtml and css with div's is so much easier to contruct with, converted a year or two ago and have never looked back. Some times it can get a little anyoying if you've made the smallest mistake, but once its sorted, its great.

Can I clear up a few things? Firstly, CSS is the style of the page, not the actual construct. HTML contains the elements to present the page. Therefore CSS is not a replacement for tables. There are no single replacements for tables. You should use the elements according to the data they are to hold. You don't necessarily need to use divs for every little section. I've developed many personal sites using only a couple of divs (for sidebar as an example) and controlling the rest of the layout through CSS on the semantically accurate tags.

Anyway, to stop being shot at dawn, well done to all of those who are now using CSS to style their projects instead of relying on archaic methods.

RanaD, I don't think anyone has been sad enough to come up with such, sorry.

Originally Posted by RanaD

Any stats on how fast you can update a site with a PHP header, footer & navbar laid out in CSS?

No stats. But, for instance, if I added a link to the navigation, I only have to change 1 file and not every one.