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Why I hate Tables

By Megan Taylor on Sunday, July 04, 2010 at 7:44 PM.

I've been thinking about why it is exactly that I dislike the use of tables for web site structure. 

Some of it has to do with the way I was taught to build web sites, but I should hope I'm smart enough to discard biased teaching. As for standards...that's a discussion for another day. 

I think it has more to do with my personal preference. 

When I started building web sites (in middle school, that's more than 10 years ago now!) tables for structure were the standard. I hated it. Remembering all the tds and trs and what cell was supposed to do what...it was really frustrating. And, now that I think back on it, limiting. 

I learned CSS in college, and it changed the way I thought about building websites. Even with stupid incompatible browsers, designing and building a website is much easier using divs. I can make them do anything I want. And the box model is not as limiting as tables were. 

I have seen some correlation between types of programmers and acceptance of tables for web design. Front-end programmers (like myself, mostly) seem to have a visceral, horrified response. Back-end programmers seem not to care much. This is just personal observation. 

I have a question for Dave though: Why are you so down on web standards?