Why use tables to structure your layout?

Question

Looking at the source code for Stack Overflow, I noticed they have used tables and inline CSS quite a bit, also something I found odd was use of inline table attribute formatting.

<table width="100%">

I'm just curious if there was any specific reason(s) to why they used tables to structure their template instead of the popular (or used to be popular) DIVs.

As well...the purpose of using CSS includes and using inline CSS on the same page (I know there is probably a great answer/solution(s) for this...I'm just curious to what they are)

I understand there is nothing wrong with using tables for tabular data...but in this case Stack Overflows tables are used for structure.

Answer 1

Tables vs. Divs is a pointless holy war.

There are specific issues with using tables in particular ways for layout that can cause problems. One of these is building an entire site layout in a single table in order to handle margins and placement -- because of the way tables are rendered this frequently means a website will not render progressively by the browser engine as the content downloads, and can only be rendered after the entire thing has been received. For a large page or slow modem user, they may be staring at a blank page for quite a while, which is a "Bad Thing". Never mind a lot of the inconsistencies in table rendering in the mozilla/ie5 generation of browsers that made consistent cross-browser table layouts somewhat painful, especially with images in the cells.

Supporters of the pure div path like to talk about content vs. presentation, because in theory HTML 4.01 is pure content, all of it meaningful. The divs provide meaningful organizational structure in an abstract sense, which is then given presentation exclusively by CSS. In these arguments, tables are valid only if being used to contain actual tabular data. Of course, this ignores the fact that for any sufficiently complex layout, there are almost always quite a few empty divs floating around simply to support the necessary hooks for presentation CSS, breaking the first level of this abstraction. Once this abstraction is broken, there's no law stating that, when your layout simply requires a presentation hook in the HTML that has no meaningful content, a div is somehow more appropriate than a table. If you are stuck with the choice of a meaningless div or a meaningless table in order to make your layout work, choose whichever is easier.

In the end, it's about being aware of the limitations in all methods and using the one that is most appropriate. There are many cases where using a table is simply easier than setting up a pointless (i.e. not-content-meaningful) array of divs, and the table rendering limitations don't apply. If the table is small and represents a minor chunk of the interior content, the rendering delay is not relevant.