Using CSS Instead of HTML Tables

Posted in Articles on 11/10/2009 06:08 pm by Guest Author

Times have evolved on the internet and previously when you thought coding couldn’t be made any more simple for you to style your websites you were wrong. CSS has taken the basic HTML coding to the next level and again when you thought your coding couldn’t look any neater, you were wrong. CSS doesn’t need the likes of HTML tables and what a superb advantage CSS is and I’ll explain why.

In the old days of HTML coding, website designers would have to use the HTML tables tags which resulted in the coding looking untidy. Not only that, without the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) coders would be coding for a lot longer which resulted in a lot of time was wasted. This all changed when CSS was introduced and don’t get me wrong, a lot of cross browser problems still occur but it’s such a good transformation to the website design industry all this is worth it.

Cross browser problems do happen a lot more frequently with the use of CSS because some browsers render the CSS functions differently and cause the website to be displayed differently between most common browsers such as IE7, IE8 and FF. There are many myths and different information on the internet which discusses cross browser compatibility and how coders should only code for the latest browers which are the likes of IE8, FF, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc. Not much of this information is true and if you do only code for the latest browsers, a big percentage of internet surfers still use Internet Explorer 6 so you’re not allowing for a huge amount of internet users who can’t view the sites you code correctly.

There are a great deal of hacks and various CSS functions you can use to cater for the whole internet browsing industry and all you need to do is learn to code for one browser such as Firefox (as recommended by professionals, given that IE7 doesn’t compile the codes correctly) then once you’ve mastered to code for one browser you can make the specific changes so your site is viewable in all website browsers and on all systems.