CSS SEO vs Table design
Safety is what comes to mind when designers choose table based design.
Why? You may ask!
Well we must firstly explore what?
Table based design and layout in web pages first came to light when web developers wanted more control over their display of their websites. Tables were firstly known as tubular data holders as they were meant for holding large amounts of data, mostly numerical. Most designers who still adopt this method of table based design do so, for the reason that it is easier to deploy website quicker.
The history behind the use of table design and layout is as follows. It was discovered that by placing a table with cells and then another table within that table you could gain a degree of control of where a certain element would lie on the web page. This however made the web pages on the website more cumbersome and harder to understand. This was apparent for any visually disabled person using reading software or Meta Search Engine crawler trying to spider or index that particular website.
To solve these issues a new standard was adopted called Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, this standard separates the design and the layout of a web page. This then created what developers call a semantic web pages, which are clean coded pages where every code piece is used for its purpose. These pages are closer to being SEO (Search Engine Optimized), thus enabling the crawlers to index the web pages with more ease. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enables a developer to place the content of the web page closer to the top in the code of the document. This enables the Meta Search Engines the ability to index the important information about the document first and inurn making the document more relevant for its intended meaning. Table based designs do not offer such flexibility as in most cases the website navigation and header comes before the grunt of the main content.
What dose this mean? Well if the information is harder for the Meta Search Engine spider to gather it may turn around and go the other way. Many Meta Search Engine spiders will only spider the first 250 characters of each page and leave for the next page. If the layout is a table-based design then only the first 100 characters of the main content may be spidered. This would then make the document less relevant, the cause being some of the main info is missing.
The next problem many developers may argue is, how may browsers accept the new standards of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)? Well the answer is enough to go with it. If a user is still using IE 5 or earlier or Netscape Navigator 4 or earlier they will not be able to do much in the way of user interaction and probably do not care much about surfing the web nor how your page looks. These users are what you call the in and outs?, they get what they are looking for specifically and get out. These individuals make up for 0% of the audience as stated from The counter ([online] http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/May/browser.php]http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/May/browser.php).
Vanillahorizon the name indicative of open minded optimism with a future orientated focus.