as the subject says:

Whats the best way to align text fields in forms?

The only ways i know of are to either use tables, which seem to be a big no no these days or to use a padding image which is just impractical and messy.

You don't need either, use CSS and you can adjust the padding in the stylesheet.

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=FormElements
http://www.picment.com/articles/css/funwithforms/

Vicky I admit that sometimes I'm lazy and will still use a table to align a form, but LNR is right you can do it with css alone. How depends on the layout you want, but padding and margins will likely come into play.

i also use table to align.it is easy.

There are a few problems associated with using tables including:-

a) Some browsers must load the entire table before any of it will be seen within the browser
b) I believe there may also be accessibility issues for special needs persons also

Hence the shift from table based web design to CSS.

thanks for your help - a little bit of padding worked wonders

use div to align text becouse div tag is search engine freindly

Ninja, search engines have no problems reading text in tables. I'm not sure where you got that, but it's wrong.

You're right though about the need for browsers to read the entire table code before presenting it. I think they all do. The need to read the code once to understand the structure of the table and then they read it a second time to actually display it. If you have a single table that's not to big it probably isn't an issue, but if you have tables nested in tables the time could be significant.

Tables can be made accessible and css can be made inaccessible.

In the end I agree that moving to css is the way forward.

sunnyverma, there's nothing especially search engine friendly about a div. You could develop a search friendly site with tables and you can create an uncrawlable site with divs. I absolutely believe in using css to layout a page and site for a lot of reasons, but search engines really don't care that much. I'd like them to because that's how I develop sites, but search engines are interested in your content and being able to get to your content.

There's plenty of speculation about css improving how well your site does with search engines, but little to know proof.

I found it difficult coding a form in CSS the first time I tried it but you can make them look so much nicer in the long run if you do.








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Sorry for the misinformation about the indexing of tables but I can swear I read something like that in my internet travels. Perhaps they have more problems associated with getting relevant info with a table as opposed to within a div.
In terms of accessibility also the way the information is presented in a table can be totally confusing to and hamper persons with a screen reader. With CSS the div with the sites main content can be put before other elements like navigation, advertisements etc.
I do agree that someone can use so many divs as to totally negate its benifits

No need to apologize. Open discussion is why we're all here. I know there are some people who will insist that css is better for search engine results, but I don't think there's really any proof. It might be that people coding with css are making less fatal search mistakes than those coding with tables.

I think you're probably more likely to develop a search friendly site with css than you are with tables, but I think it's more that people who understand how to develop for a search engine will prefer to use css. I think you can build search friendly sites with either.

That makes sense about the accessibility. I wonder if it's again more to do with who's doing the coding. I would think you could easily create a css driven site that's confusing to screen readers too. But I can see how all the table nesting would create problems that css wouldn't.

And just to make sure we're clear I never develop anything with a table layout. Sadly I've had to work on existing sites that use them, but I only develop css driven layouts.