With the advent of web designing, one thing that was linked to it was the use of tables. But as the trends are changing, technologies are emerging, so do the linked tables. Once the ‘in’ thing, they are now actually ‘getting out of place’. When most of the websites used tables in their design, some designers thought about throwing it out and bring some change in designing.
In simple words, web design in tableless manner is a method where HTML tables are not used to achieve page layout control. The control is rather achieved using a masterpiece of World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, in other words, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS was designed so that HTML can be relieved from the job of presentation and can solely focus on semantic purposes. CSS is also used for better web accessibility.
There are a lot of answers to the question that why have tables nearly disappeared? The most important of the answers to this is that tables do not adhere to the standards of Search Engines. If a web page does not use table then it becomes easier for Search Engine to index and rank it. The page rank refers to the ranking given to a web page by a Search Engine. The higher the page rank, the better for the page as a high page rank ensures that the page link will be displayed in the first few search pages. It thus ensures a greater number of visitors to the site and thus in turn good business.
Over a few years, there have been developments to incorporate logic into sites and improve the accessibility of the web to the user. In due course, mobile phones, text readers, blogs etc. were considered. Thus the need arose to eliminate tables so as to make sites compatible to these elements.
All the browsers operational now-a-days support CSS and thus any site using it is compatible with them. Hence there is no room for tables to stay. Moreover a tableless web design is the standard of W3C now.
An important use of the new technology is that any change can be applied to whole of the website in one go instead of changing code for every page. For example, the design of all the headlines of a site can be changed to newer one using CSS layout control.
The code which is unnecessary is removed and cleared with the help of XHTML and CSS thus leaving a more manageable and sleek code.
There are some web designers who favor the use of tables as it simplifies the design process. Also tables are compatible with most of the web browsers but keeping in mind the above reasons for web designing going tableless, tables are getting removed.
