Table Or Div's

[Chris92]

When designing a website i've always preferd to use tables as (in my opinion) they are easier to create and manage but it seems most sites now prefer to use divs insted. Am i being a div in using tables or should i switch to div's?

[chibineku]

The best reason not to use tables is accessibility.There are plenty of internet users who have to navigate by tedious means, or who have to listen to a page reader tell them where they are and the structure of the page. If you use tables where they aren't necessary, these people have got a long wait to get where they want to get - and will probably just leave. Tables for tabular data are fine, but it's also a good idea to use the various labelling and descriptive tags that you can use for them, so that people who can't see or otherwise understand your page structure easily know what information goes with what headings etc.

[jeffman]

Using tables is easier if you don't want to know a lot about using HTML and CSS. But they do not provide a structure for making complex, sophisticated looking pages. For that, you must turn to block formatting (divs, usually) and CSS.

[Ingolme]

Aside from loading times and bandwidth, the reason not to use tables is because they were never intended for site layout since the first HTML draft.The reason people used tables for layout is because CSS did not exist and that was the only way to position things in the page. Now that CSS exists, making a site with tables gives an old-fashioned impression to any web developers that may visit your page.You might not believe it, but using tables is not easier than laying out sites with <div> elements and CSS, it just requires a different way of thinking and usually people have difficulty changing their way of thinking.CSS layouts are much more flexible than tables. If you use an external stylesheet (as is recommended), it is so much faster that often a user won't realise that they've loaded a new page if they click on a link that leads to another page with the same layout. It will appear to them as if only the content had changed.