It seems great for getting rid of some cruft and for producing simple layouts but all the solutions I’ve tried for laying out moderately complex forms seem to horribly break far too often. Really whats the point if technology has so many poor implementations so widely used you can’t rely on it! Everybody keeps saying that it works if you know what you doing - fine but I haven’t seen a reliable way of making divs work for me satisfactorily.

Stick with tables for forms, its only a couple extra tag, which for me are all generated by scripts.

However, on the other hand, HTML is much more light than Flash. I coded flash yesterday and it is unbelievable how often I have to drag out the OMG! and @#$@#%^%# and WTF! because something is not working as one would expect. I’m not a Flash expert, but I’ve got enough milage to be able to use my generic knowledge of movie creation, programming language and other techniques and Flash keeps baffling me (anyone tried to use that String panel?). Flash is not straight forward, with many buts and maybe’s from a programming perspective (keep selecting that actions layer), and IMHO due to this also not suited for application development. It is not without reason that Flex is created.

But when using Flex, one quickly loses the sleekness which usually makes Flash applications stand out. It quickly becomes a good looking but fairly standard GUI application. Now, I’m not sure in what direction the future will lead us. IMHO Java (applets and JavaFX) has good cards for real application development because of its proven trackrecord in stability and available functionality, although it (unjustly) has a bad name in this area. But especially with the improvements in the upcoming release of JDK6u10, it could become a competitor again. On the other hand Flash has a proven trackrecord in GUI and sleekness, although I observed that the new Flash 9 player seems to crash very often. I still have to see what Silverlight and all other approaches will do in the end.

In the end the RIA still is embedded in a webpage. And all the RIA platforms (Java, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, …) at the moment are too complex to quickly do some text and images. So in the end we still will be doing HTML and still require it to layout properly.

These people claiming it is easy are fooling themselves. “Oh, well *if* you just learned how to use it…” I call crap. Every layout, every damn page, renders differently and bizarrely if so much as a few bits of HTML are changed in IE browsers you can’t count on knowledge. Even in better browsers, to achieve all but the most basic, right-angled layouts, you have a soup of divs. Float hacks, and clearing hacks that must follow, ad nauseam.

How about we scrap it and try using the power of software as it should be done. Advanced layout and control has been available for 15+ years with things like LaTex, PDF, and so one. HTML was great in 1994, for limited use of document transport, but today it is not. Look at all the time and money spent to produce things like Google Apps and such. Have you ever looked at the code behind it?

No, HTML and CSS must be left behind as the Stone axes and tools of cavemen. Something like Flash that can do real layout, typography, audio, video, server communications, etc. is what is needed. You want SEO and accessibility too? No problem. Server text in a very simple format while user agents that are capable can load the binary Flash. Of course, what we don’t need is FLash and Silverlight as they are, controlled by single companies, but seriously…

HTML and painful, tedious markup sucks. CSS and painful, unstable, unsupported hacks suck. Let’s move on to the future, shall we?

Ultimately, we just need a few popular CSS folks to blog to the unwashed masses that CSS tables are not taboo, and the clamoring will disappear overnight.

/Baaah

As far as using css to emulate an html table, if the markup is sound and semantic then who cares what the css looks like or how many css hacks you used to get your layout to work?

And as far as using tables for layout, I’m realistic- it’s not yet a perfect world and I know there are deadlines which mean compromises must be made. But if you don’t comprehend what I first typed at the beginning of this comment, then you really don’t understand web standards or what semantic markup is and I encourage you to jump right in and start to learn!

After reading the entire list of posts, it seems there are a lot of people struggling to use CSS and DIV tags for layout. Conditional comments are preferred over hacks. External control of layout is preferred over the use of mark-up tags. “Content first” is marginalized over consistency.

I am frustrated by browser differences, but I don’t see the conflict ever going away. IE6 will not load on Windows Vista and I hear that IE7 will not load on Windows 2000. There is proprietary software that mandates the use of IE for communication, like in the Mortgage biz, so until those industries embrace FF … . Windows 98 is no longer supported, so we should see an influx of new users of IE7 or IE8 over the next year or so. Windows XP will be supported through 2014 keeping IE6 alive for another 6 years. And who’s to say that web standards will not change rendering the current beta versions non-compliant almost immediately after they are released?

Is it worth it to go through the pains of making the sites look good on all browsers? Only as far as the money goes.

“How does this make life any simpler?”

If you view it from a purely selfish point of view, you’re right. However, if you care about who uses it (or simply doing good work), you’re wrong on each count.

You would probably use just as many divs as tr’s & td’s!!

If you used a hybrid (minimal table) layout, tables don’t use much more, however, if you are using tables for layout and do a complex design, putting presentational markup quickly swamps the page.

If you’re thinking the symantec web argument, don’t even bother. HTML is a Markup Language and definitely not XML or anything else.

There is more of an argument for HTML than XML! User agents are supposed to treat tables as tabular data, not sections of a page. User agents don’t have a clue what a random XML element might mean.

If you’re thinking of the whole layout change argument, how much less work would it be using div’s rather than re-arranging the table structure.

As well as Thierry Koblentz’s point, you don’t have control over the source order when using tables.

If you’re thinking of the whole layout change argument, how much less work would it be using div’s rather than re-arranging the table structure. Does it really save you or anyone else any time?

The point is not even related to the time it would take to change the layout, but to the fact that with DIVs there is nothing to “re-arrange”, there is nothing to modify in the markup.
The layout is modified through the presentational layer (CSS), the structure of the document does not have to be changed to allow a different layout (as long as the HTML flow is not an issue).