World Wide Web (WWW) came into being as Tim Berners-Lee combined Internet with hypertext. In those days hypertext was capable of carrying user inputs like emails, news posting in public forums while browsing information used to be kept in a single computer.
In those days Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was capable of doing rudimentary activities of giving heading, paragraph and hyperlinks. Its primary objective was to share scientific documents and research papers online. With expansion of Internet from academic and research arena to mainstream and business world, it evolved to enable people to display graphic inputs. In fact, most professionals started using tables and spacers for creating and maintaining page layout.
Numerous problems stimulated out of this type of coding. Often the code of pages used to contain not only tables but also nested tables. Such codes increased the size of HTML documents. Larger documents occupy greater bandwidth than smaller documents. Thus larger documents were reducing the speed of data transfer via Internet. Besides, linearization of tabulated content by screen readers for visually impaired persons or so by search engines results in jumbled content.
The advent of WYSIWYG editors helped professionals and novices to avoid detail know-how of coding with HTML. This editor encouraged indirectly use of nested tables for positioning contents. Due to such practice code happened to be redundant sometimes. Redundancy of code increased manifold because of inefficient designs.
This problem further invigorated by use of slicing tools in graphic editors. This practice often produced poor codes with tables containing many rows of 1 pixel dimension. The resultant codes used to be bigger in size than the actual contents.
In the millennium, the trend of this messy coding practice started to get harder criticism. Simultaneously the urgency for codes without table gained attention of coders.
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) though existed even before advent of WWW but as a tool of designing remained subdued for quite a long time. To overcome the problems of complex and larger HTML documents, style sheet languages of nine different types were proposed in the www-style mailing list of W3C. In October, 1994, two of the nine languages, viz, Cascading HTML Style Sheet and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal were proposed by Hakon Wium Lie. Among them, the second can be considered as today’s CSS which can be applied to many markup languages other than HTML.
From the viewpoint of W3C’s Web Access Initiative recommended Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the tables and nested tables of HTML are not user friendly for physically and intellectually disabled persons. It has also vied for CSS.
CSS helps separating design and content. Tables are passé only with respect to positioning HTML elements on the page. Yet HTML tables are still in vogue for displaying tabulated data of content.
At Site Design Web, we have found that around 40% of all our clients explicitly demand that we don’t use any tables for general layout. It seems that people are becoming more aware of the fact that CSS is a much better and easier alternative to using tables for creating and editing later on.