CSS vs Tables, Whats the Difference?

By Paul Bliss
Posted Wednesday, September 29, 2004

There is a thought among web designers that these two items are similar. In some ways they are, but in most cases this couldn't further from the truth. First, let's look at the similarities. They both will enable you to effectively organize your site with various forms of spacing. They can be used for determining the alignment of your text or images that appear on your site. Other properties include the ability to precisely measure the width of a text area, or even the entire page. That's about the area that tables fizzle out. They're great for organizing your page layout, but to give all the pages on your site a customized and dynamic look, Cascading Style Sheets are what you need. By creating a Style Sheet, you can then hyperlink all of your site pages to the CSS sheet for all the settings for your fonts, sizes, colors, etc. Another added bonus of using Cascading Style Sheets is that they are Search Engine friendly. If you maintain all of your site settings in one area, as opposed to plopping the code in on every page, the spiders of the search engines will have more content rather than code to digest. And as I heard somebody famous once say: "Indecision is the key to flexibility." ~ Paul

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