When I first opened my eyes to tableless design, I was scared. I had spent my whole design life (age 13-24) using tables, or using WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. How was I going to reboot my brain into using DIV layers and Sytlesheets? It was tough. But I did it because it was the best way to go.

By seperating content from style you free up a lot of clutter in your html pages. This allows the search engine robots to find exactly what they are looking for quickly, without getting lost in table row after row. The text flows consistently, regardless of where it appears on your page. How? Because you put little clues in your html telling the browser where to look in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet, which is located in a seperate file that only the browser cares about) and that stylesheet tells the browser how to display your content. Font, layout, pictures, backgrounds, they are all ‘controlled’ by the stylesheet but ‘exist’ in the html.

This also makes it easy to update the look of your website (say you want to change the font across your entire site, or move a navigation bar) by editing ONE file instead of one hundred (ok, most sites don’t have a hundred pages, but still).

When I decided (look at me, the decision maker!) to switch my method again and produce my web client’s sites in a Content Managment System (CMS) I of course wanted to find one that used CSS and XHTML as much as possible. While the convenience of the CMS to manage the site is far greater, at least with using a standards-based system such as Joomla, my clients still benefit from the search engine friendliness of standards based design. The content is still seperate from the design. It’s also really easy to change the ‘template’ for a fresh new site as needed- content remaining.

But what is the “standards” that I speak of? A while back a group of people decided that web design was far too scattered and had no standards whatsoever. Think back to the ugliness that you witnessed online back in say 1995. Harsh and huge bacground files, table upon table of lagging, slow loading code. Mess after mess of navigational errors. Nothing was clear or concise. The World Wide Web Consorium (W3C) decided it was time to set a standard. And they did, using the concept of CSS and XHTML. Unfortunately not all the browser companies caught one (read Microsoft) and until recently they didn’t all do their best to support this method of design which has developed a MASSIVE following amongst professional designers. Thankfully, Internet Explorer got the idea and started displaying pages with CSS/XHTML properly (for the most part). But this las paragraph is a whole nother story!