Tableless websites
Very often the basic layout of a website is created using tables because in tables it is very easy to create columns and rows and organize the information in those columns and rows. For instance if you want a three-column layout you simply create a table that has three columns and a single row. Then you can keep on adding content to the left, center, and the right columns and the row keeps expanding downwards to accommodate the content. This is the easiest way of creating a three-column layout. You can have separate rows at the top and at the bottom to add header and footer information. In between while arranging content within the table cells you can add more tables and even within those tables you can keep adding more tables and eventually your layout becomes full of tables. This is called a table-based layout. This kind of layout is considered primitive, outmoded and incompatible. HTML tables were supposed to be used to display data in the tabular form, they were never meant to be used for layout purposes.CSS designing techniques let you create tableless layouts using DIVs and such layouts are called DIV-based layouts. Different DIVs can be arranged using CSS definitions to create multi-column layouts easily. OK, I must candidly add here that creating DIV-based layouts is not as easy as it seems; there are many compatibility issues but the problem is with browsers and not with CSS definitions. Design that looks marvelous in Firefox may look totally crappy in Internet Explorer but the problem is with Internet Explorer and not CSS because there are some bugs in this browser that stop it from rendering CSS layouts properly. But there are some workarounds that you can use.Creating tableless websites also makes sense if you want to keep your data separate from design. Since creating tableless layouts means you will be heavily using CSS definitions to create the layout, your layout won't depend on the data. This means, having the same data, with just a few changes in the CSS definitions you can completely alter the entire look of the website whether it has five pages or 5000 pages. Also there are many handheld devices that render only those pages that have tableless layouts.

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