Until recently there seemed to be some sort of trend in the world of web design where webmasters designed websites with tables. What’s wrong with that? To the untrained eye table based websites could pass for a perfectly well designed site. However, in comparison to the benefits and ease of CSS, table based sites are a bad option.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) uses relational code in comparison to tables which uses redundant and repeated code. This decreases the file size of the page and in turn decreases the bandwith used. Also, relational data means that the whole site can be redesigned easily as proved by CSS Zen Garden which shows that using CSS stylesheets, the whole design of a website can be changed very easily.

In terms of accessability, CSS outperforms tables as it is used far more effectively on browsers, platforms and devices that display the website. This also increases the pages potential number of viewers to disabled people or even people on the move.
Tables do not conform to web standards as well as CSS styled websites because of the complicated markup used;- nesting tables within tables and using spacer GIFs. Also, CSS layouts have a more structured layout that helps search engine spiders crawl directly to the content of the page.

A good thing about tables (they do exist!) is that they work very well for marking up tabular data such as the calendar on the siderbar to your right. The layout of the data is in a form that fits perfectly with the layout of a table.
One of the best things about CSS is the fact that it is so easy to learn - now there’s no excuse to design your website with tables!