OK, so I'm working on a project in which the developers are laying out tabular data using divs. The site is using the 960 CSS grid system so making the 'tables' work just means applying the appropriate class to align each div/table cell to the grid. They say this is good because: It's fast They can manipulate the resulting DOM much more easily than they could with a table Developers find it easier to, say, add or remove columns from the tables, without having to edit the code all the way down the table (no wysiwyg editors here!) To me this doesn't seem very good because: It's not very semantic (although they've used micro data in the class names for some divs) It doesn't seem very accessible -- I might be wrong about this, but to me good semantics is foundational to accessibility There's a lot of markup -- I know tables aren't exactly light on code, but they seem quite light and efficient in comparison It doesn't seem to me like the code will be very easy to maintain for anyone but the developers.
The lead developers assure me that this is good practice for speed and efficiency, but I'm not convinced. Nevertheless, I don't want to be advocating tables as best practice if they aren't. What do you think? Are tables too hard for the real world in large sites or web apps where large amounts of DOM manipulation is required? Or have these guys taken the 'Tables are bad' thing a bit too far? Kind regards, David ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
