Table-Based Layout Is The Next Big Thing
With the release of IE8 coming this year, the stage is set for all that to change. IE8 will be the last of the major browsers to add support for CSS tables, which will enable designers to use table-based layout techniques without misusing HTML table markup.
Holy crap! All those web developers who jumped ship when everyone started moving towards CSS-only layouts can get back in on the good times once IE8 hits the streets in 2009.
Why’s that?
First off, a little history. Prior to the CSS and web standards movement that started gathering steam with the launch of IE5.5/IE6 in the early 2000’s, designers and web developers had no robust tools for building websites with complex layouts.
There was, however, a well-suppored feature of HTML that was intended for use in displaying tabular data (i.e. stuff like your checkbook, or a spreadsheet). What we found out in the mid nineties is that it was possible to fake a lot of designed by perverting the table element to do our bidding.
While those techniques resulted in good looking designed that rendered well across all major browsers, the problem lies within the realm of assessibility. A design implmented in tables has no semantic meaning. A table is intended to display tabular data. You wouldn’t design a t-shirt with scaffolding like a building, would you?
Problems arise when web search engines like Goolge come to index your webpage. Google has no idea that you’ve used a table for the design and assumes you’re trying to present tabular data. This causes your page to be indexed improperly. Secondly, individuals who are blind use programs called screen readers to render websites using speech. With your website spread around willy nilly in a table to meet the design specifications, there’s no way for a screen reader to know what order to read the page’s content in.
CSS3 has the solution, though. There is a display mode that allows web developers to mimic the presentational nature of a table while retaining the semantic and structural nature that the document requires for easy machine-processing. Almost every major web browser has supported this feature for quite a while now, except for one, and that one is the most important, Internet Explorer. This effectively killed this technique until Microsoft announced IE8, and not only the existance of IE8, but that their new browser would render all web pages in a strict standards compliant mode out of the box. I’m looking forward to 2009 and forward, it looks like we’ll be living in a whole new world of web development!
