Why CSS Instead of Tables?
It’s easy to understand why someone would be leery of dumping tables for CSS. Tables are a proven quantity, they’re familiar, and they’re safe. Moving to CSS is a lot of work. While tables are great for creating cool layouts, they can also present accessibility problems. The main problem is accessibility, especially for the blind. Most screen readers for the Web don’t handle the content of tables very well — instead of reading text from left to right, they read it downwards. The meaning of the text in the table will often be lost. By using CSS, you can make changes to the look and feel of your Web pages without extensive re-coding. By changing a single CSS file, you can (for example) modify column widths, change fonts, and more. The changes are automatically reflected in the Web pages that use the CSS file. Finally, you may see some increase in the speed in which a Web pages laid out using CSS renders compared to a page using a table layout. This is especially true for large tables. M
