Tableless web design

Tableless web design (or tableless web layout) is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page. HTML is a markup language whose visual presentation was initially left up to the user. However, as the Internet expanded from the academic and research world into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the visual appearance of their Web pages. As popularised especially by the designer David Siegel in his book Creating Killer Web sites, tables and spacers (usually transparent single pixel GIF images with explicitly specified width, height or margins) were used to create and maintain page layouts. In the late 1990s the first reasonably powerful WYSIWYG editors arrived on the market, which meant Web designers no longer needed a technical understanding of HTML to build web pages. Such editors indirectly encouraged extensive use of nested tables to position design elements. As designers edited their documents in these editors, unnecessary code and empty elements were added to the document. Furthermore, unskilled designers were likely to use tables more than required when using a WYSIWYG editor. This practice frequently led to many tables nested within tables, as well as tables with unnecessary rows and columns. The use of graphic editors with slicing tools that output HTML and images directly also promoted poor code with tables often having many rows of 1 pixel height or width. Sometimes many more lines of code were used to render content than the actual content itself. The reliance on tables for layout purposes caused a number of problems. Many web pages were designed with tables nested within tables, resulting in large HTML documents that use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting.