Posted by David Dorward on 06/19/06 11:21

Habib wrote:

> After I designed my page (using tables), while I was surfing the web I
> considered a professional looking web site which had been used DIV tags
> instead of tables, with many css classes. Designing in div layers is
> much more time consuming and more skillful.

Not really. Any difference is exaggerated by there being a lot of
people who know how to hack tables into acting like layout tools, and
fewer who know CSS well enough.

> - I've read in a post (2003) "using tables to display tabular data is
> right but never use them to layout structuring." but why?

1. Claming a relationship between bits of data where no such
relationship exists is a lie.

2. Not all browsers present data visually

> - As I've got curious I visited some famous websites and I checked the
> code. for example fifaworldcup.com uses tables for layout, but css
> <div>, <ul> and <li> for header menu items. so combined both of them. I
> mixed up! if div is good for menu how it's not perfect for the other
> parts?

See above

> - Which one is perfect for search engines ranking? Does it affect?

In theory, semantic markup is better food for search engines.

In practise, search engines don't make public their algorithums so its
hard to say.

> - Another thing was that they had been used 10 tables with 5 rows each,
> while they could put all tabular data in a single table with 50 rows.
> does it have any benefit (using several tables instead of one I mean)?

Use whatever markup best describes the data. Any rendering speedups
caused by chopping a table up could likely be gained through
table-layout: fixed as well.

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