The great table debate

Tables were initially intended as a means of displaying tabular data online, enabling web
designers to rapidly mark up things like price lists, statistical comparisons, specification
lists, spreadsheets, charts, forms, and so on.

It wasn’t long, however, before web designers realized that you could place any web content
within table cells, and this rapidly led to web designers chopping up Photoshop layouts
and piecing them back together in table-based web pages, often by using automated
tools. CSS should have put an end to that, but many web designers continue to use tables
for layout because they’re simple to set up—even though they cause problems (see the
“Tables for layout” section later in the chapter).
The strong will of CSS advocates, who typically shout that tables are evil, sometimes leads
designers to believe that tables should be ditched entirely—however, that’s not the case at
all. As mentioned, tables have a specific purpose in HTML, and one that’s still valid.
Therefore, the bulk of this chapter is going to look at tables in the context for which
they’re intended: the formatting of tabular data. Web page layout will be looked at in the
next chapter, which concentrates on CSS layout.