CSS tableless layout
Tableless web design (or tableless web layout) is a method of web design and web development without using HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page. CSS was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational. source
Why tableless CSS is better than tables?
Many webpages have been designed with tables, nested in tables. This results in a large HTML file, which use more bandwidth than documents with more simple formatting (such as CSS).
Often, many more lines of code are used to render content, than the actual content itself!
CSS were developed to improve the separation between design and content and help the semantic organization of content on the Web.
Advantages of CSS tableless layout
- bandwidth savings, due to the smaller size of the css documents
- maintainability: when you have a CSS layout, you usualy control the whole design from a single file
- accessibility
