Reasons and principles for creating a website without a table

In a time of web developers who just like to say that 'tables' and can't (or won't) explain why, this article will attempt to give you some solid reasons that people create tableless designs. included are six major benefits of creating tableless sites, and how to modify your desire to alter your website to a resistant manager.
At the same time, web designers all said: tables are the devil! But they cannot tell the reason. Here, I will give you some convincing reasons why people are reluctant to use tables to create webpages. It includes four benefits of creating a table-free website, and how to turn the website into a persistent "ruler" and sell it out.
Let's begin with the benefits of a tableless layout. these are only in the order that I feel they shoshould go in, some things are more important to other people, so rank them as you will.
Let's start with the benefits of table layout. This is because it is critical to many people.
Forces You To Write Well-Formed Code
Forces you to write rigorous code.
You cannot have a properly made tableless layout, and use improper and non-standard code. well, let me correct that-you can (technically you can do it) but it defeats the whole purpose. when you are creating a tableless design, you should be using standards compliant code. I think that anything that makes you get into the habit of always writing clean code is a good thing.
You cannot use inappropriate or nonstandard code for a non-table layout. Let me make corrections-you can (technically only), but doing so will make all Goals fail. When designing a table-free architecture, you must use a set of suitable and standard code. In my opinion, it is a good thing for you to develop a good programming habit.
Faster Loading Time
Faster download
This is absolutely a benfit of a tableless layout, and for several reasons. first, on a fundamental level-tables load slowly. for the most part, unless you set the height and width of your table elements, all the text has to be loaded and rendered BEFORE the table sizes itself to the page. of course, this is what so far people loved about tables isn' t it? The fact that they were so easily sizeable. The downside is how much more time they take to load.
Table-free layout is very advantageous, which includes the following reasons: 1. In terms of basic principles, using table layout will slow down the download speed. More importantly, no matter how you set the height and width of the table elements, all the elements in the table will be loaded before the table is loaded. This may be why many people are keen on table layout! In fact, tables are generally of a large size, so they are loaded for a longer time. We cannot ignore the download time.
Okay, so the solution to that loading time is to set all the values explicitly, right? So now we see another downside. code clutter that increases loading time. first of all, just by themselves, tables take a lot of code. how many td open and close tags does your average table based layout have? Tons. having to set all the values explicitly only adds to the page size and loading time. there are using experiments that have been done on this topic, I'll point you toward this one that StopDesign did on a remake of the Microsoft website from a tablebased site to a tableless layout. that remake showed a 62% file size limit ction of the site, and using their average hits per month for the Microsoft site, calculated that Microsoft wocould be saving 924 GIGS in bandwidth per day, and 329 Terabytes of bandwidth per year. for any company that pays for bandwidth, these things are important.
Therefore, we must set all values clearly to reduce the download time. Next, let's take a look at other disadvantages: Code chaos will increase the loading time. First, the table itself contains a lot of code. You can check the number of "td" start and end tags. I think there should be many. To make them clearer, you must increase the size of the webpage to prolong the download time. We have conducted many experiments on this topic. Try not to use table layout any more. Let's take a look at Microsoft's practices. They used table layout and started to use non-table layout. Research shows that this method saves the website 62% space. By calculating the average monthly click rate, Microsoft will save 924 GIGS of bandwidth every day and terabytes of bandwidth in one year. This is necessary for any company that occupies a large bandwidth.
Easier to Read Code
Ease of coding
If you are using standard code, semantic document conventions, and a tableless layout, your code can be so clean that it looks practically like just regular text with a few exactically symbols.
If you use standard code, standard semantic documents, and non-table layout, your code will look very clear, just like a regular text with some special symbols.
That is a great benefit because it not only makes it easier for you to update, but it makes it easier for a non-technical user to make small alterations. additionally, if you work as a web developer in a more freelance capacity, it is common for there to be a full-time web developer who has to maintain that site. clean and simple to read code makes that a easy transition. we like it when people Leave us easy to understand code, right? Let's return the favor.
The advantage of using a non-table layout is that you can not only update webpages, but also make minor modifications and conversions for non-job users. In addition, if you are a freelance web designer, you can also let professional web designers remember your website. The simplicity of the Code makes code conversion very easy. We all want code developers to leave simple code for us. Therefore, when writing code, consider this.
Print Alternate Views
Convenient style Definition
When you create a page using a table-layout, you are rather unfortunately locked into a certain layout. developers who have created table-based websites, as most of us have at some point-particle ly if you were in the industry before the big tableless movement, know that you often have to create a separate printable version of your pages. this can be, needless to say, quite tiresome.
When using table layout to create a webpage, you should not stick to a specific layout method. Developers who use table layout, just like most of us, must note that if you are engaged in design work before the "webpage design without table" campaign, you must create an independent style for each webpage.
Controls of printing style control is a huge benefit with a tableless layout. you can easily create a single new printing style that applies to all your pages, instead of making them individually. that alone is a huge time saver, but there is more.
Simple output style control is a huge advantage of non-table layout. You can easily create a new simple layout and apply it to all webpages without having to design a set of styles for each page. This will undoubtedly save a lot of time.
While you can control all elements with this approach, the biggest key is organization of information within the page itself. using the example, let's assume that the display order we want all our pages to print using the following order: The page header first, the content next, the special news after that, then the link list, and then the footer. however! We still want it to display as it wowould normally when viewing (meaning the header at the top, the links on the left, content in the middle, news on the right, and footer at the bottom ). with a table-based layout, you wowould have to create a new page to do that special printing organization because the print style will read your columns left to right. with a table-less layout, you are not bound by t His. You can order the content in your page however you like, and still control the way it looks... all by using the CSS only!
When you use this method to control all elements, the first key point to consider is how to effectively organize all the information on the page itself. Let's imagine the following sorting method: first, the top, then the content, then the specific news information and link list, and finally the footer. However, we still want it to be displayed according to our normal browsing habits (that is, the top of the header; the left of the Link List; the middle of the content; and the right of the News; footer at the bottom ). If you use table layout, you must create a new page because the read order of the table is from left to right. However, if you use a table-free layout, then you will not be bound by this form. You can place content as you like and control it properly. You only need to use CSS to achieve the above purpose.
Additionally, because we can put the content in whatever order we want in the HTML, and then move the content blocks around for website viewing using CSS-we can have ultimate control over presentation.
In addition, because we can use CSS to place all or part of the content in any part of the HTML page, we can make arbitrary control over its representation.
That is very important because the clean code, and ability to alter presentation, means that your site can be viewable by someone on a small mobile phone screen. The flexibilty and organization leads to being able to create a powerful website that takes advantage of some of the possibilities with XHTML.
Because code streamlining is so important, it can control the expression and position of content at will. Therefore, even on a mobile phone screen, it can easily display your webpage. We can use XHTML's scalability and organization to create excellent websites.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization
Due to the fact that you can organize your most important content at the top of the your page, without affecting the layout, your page can be better optimized for search engines. for instance, say that I have a navigation bar on the left side of the page that lists tons of parts of the site that are actually great keywords. I cocould move that navigation bar code higher up in my actual HTML, without changing the layout, because I'm using the CSS to position the navigation where I want it.
Because you can place the most important content on the top of the page using a non-table layout without affecting the entire layout, your page can be optimized by the search engine to the maximum extent. For example, I placed a navigation bar on the left of the page and wrote some keywords with a very high sampling rate. Therefore, I can write the navigation bar code before the HTML code without affecting the layout of the entire page. Because I use CSS to adjust its position.
Those search engines can also more clearly find common words throughout your document without having to filter through code. search engines prioritize websites that have a higher content to code ratio, so putting all your style elements into your external CSS stylesheet makes your site highly content based to a search engine. tableless layouts, as previusly mentioned, decrease page size and loading time-another bonus to search engines.
Search engines can find General keywords for the entire document without filtering the code. The search engine searches for pages with a large proportion of the content. Therefore, it places the style elements in an external style table so that the content can be highlighted. The table-free layout mentioned above significantly reduces the page size and download time, allowing you to make greater use of search engines.
Presentation Flexibility
Comprehensive Adaptability
Making changes to a CSS based Tableless layout is simple. you can alter the CSS file only, changing as your styles and graphics as you want. the affects cascade through all the pages on your website, and eliminate the need for manually updating pages.
CSS-based non-table layout is a very simple method. You can change the style and image you want by changing the CSS file. Using Cascading Style Sheets throughout the website can reduce the daily page update workload.
For one of the best known examples of how powerful presentation can be, you can visit the CSS Zen Garden and navigate through the 'select a Design 'links to see the differences. each of the different designs uses exactly the same HTML file content. the only thing that changes is the CSS file for each one.
You can visit the famous Website: CSS Zen Garden, which is classic throughout the page layout. You can click "Select a Design" on the navigation bar to view different layout styles. Different Design Styles use completely consistent HTML content. It only uses different CSS to change the HTML content.
Selling Yourself On Standards
Use different standards to promote yourself
Sometimes knowing how to code for standards, and create flexible tableless layouts is not enough. there are some web designers who meet with difficulties from their management. most often those difficulties are rooted in the management being unaware of the benefits of using tableless content and CSS driven layout.
Here we will talk about: using standard code, it is still not enough to create a scalable, table-free layout. Some website designers still encounter many difficulties in website management. In most cases, this is caused by ignoring the content of the non-table layout and the CSS layout method.
If you want to design for standards, but you work for a company that is not very forward-thinking in allowing you the time to work on the changes -- try this: make them think about their pocket-book. point out the cost saving benefits.
If you want to standardize the design, but your company does not allow it, it may delay the time. You can do this: record them in a pocket notebook and point out where the cost can be saved.
For instance, try grabbing a single page of existing code. clean it up to standards. compare the page size to before (including image optimization), and count the difference in bytes saved. multiply that hosts ss the number of site pages, and the number of days per month. then explain to them the amount of bandwidth cost saved monthly if this was done has ss the whole site. if that isn' t enough, show them how quickly you can make changes to a website once it is CSS driven, and push the idea that you will be able to change the site more rapidly when there are needed updates, and you will have more time to focus on adding in new functionality to the site-instead of spending your time doing maintenance.
For example, capture the existing code pages as much as possible and re-write the code in a concise and standard code format. Then, compare the size differences between the two pages (including image optimization) and calculate the size difference. Next, explain how much bandwidth cost can be saved each month based on the new layout. If this is not enough, you can describe how much download speed will be improved with CSS layout, and how much Update time can be saved during page update. In this way, you can save time to improve the functionality of the website-thus saving most of the maintenance time.
Summary
Summary
Hopefully, this little article will serve as a way to get you started on understanding why to use a tableless layout, what the benefits are, and you can easily take a look at Layout Gala and download just 1, or all 40 of the tableless layout examples to get you started. however, the best step toward moving to a tableless design is to slowly move your website toward a standard compliant version first, before you get rid of the tables. to get to that point, study as much on CSS as you can, read through the articles here and elsewhere on the web, and moving from table layouts to tableless will be just a matter of time.
The purpose of this article is to allow everyone to have doubts about the non-table layout and to use this method for layout. Here is a shortcut. You can download 40 templates on the Layout Gala website for Layout. Before you stop using a table, you should try to slow down the non-table process of the website. You should fully study CSS technology. After reading this article and other related articles on the website, it is only a matter of time for you to create a website without a table layout.