A lot of web developers are strongly opinionated that divs should be used for design and tables for tabular data, but I am still not entirely convinced that website designers should jump on it yet. I have designed web sites using both, and in my experience I have found that carefully using tables produces more cross browser compatible designs than using divs carefully. Does anybody have any strong evidence or convictions on either side of the fence for this argument?

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I think there is a bit more learning to get divs to work correctly, but my Search Marketing Info website is fluid 3 column display which my friend made to display correctly on all browsers.

Some stuff does make more sense to do in a table though. The tabs in my site are made in a table. I think it is probably best to mix and match where it makes sense.

Of course I am not a designer though and have limited design knowledge.

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The big advantage of divs is that you can use the same design for numerous pges in a site and only write the bulk of the code once in an external css file. There are some who think that getting the code into an external file also can help in the SERPs because the search engine spider sees a higher percentage of content and less coding on your actual page. I'm not sure that it matters in that regard, though.

The problem with divs is that there's a lot of browser variability. There shouldn't be, because there are css standards, but most browser fail to follow some of the standards. IE is notorious for this, which is particularly frustrating because a majority of people use it. I think the jury is going to be out for a while on which is better, and since Microsoft doesn't seem to be in a hurry to comply with css, the situation may stay in limbo indefinitely.

Exactly. This is why I am not entirely convinced that abolishing tables as design elements is a good idea.

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You are not alone. I occasionally look through the high-raqnking pages in competitive search terms to see what other people are doing. The overwhelming majority use tables for most of their design layout. Even many that use css for "style" types of things like fonts, colors, etc, still use tables for their layout.

We are shocked, shocked . . . .

There are some far-out, doubtless insane fringe nuts who will tell you that M$ does that on purpose. How very silly: yon Billius is an honorable man . . . .

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Divs vs. tables seems to be an irrelevant comparison. What seems to be the case in question is standards vs. nonstandards. In defense for tables, you can still use them and make standard based sites. The whole point to remove presentation from code. Not sure how much code to content helps SEO but it's something to think about when building a site, and depending on on what level you take (transitional, strict, priority1-2-3) you can remove all presentation from code.

Note sites such as Cingular, Wired, ESPN, Inc.com, Fast Company. They are very complex sites that work on all browsers past NN4. So saying that divs are bad because they display different in browsers is like saying water is bad because I don't know how to swim.

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Well, I for one agree. I never said divs are bad, in fact, I much prefer them. I would only warn anyone using them to beware of the very popular, but non-compliant, browsers.

I just built a layout for a site yesterday with CSS and semantically correct xhtml. No tables whatsoever. I've got horizontal tabs in unordered lists, as opposed to tables. All my tests so far have shown pixcel-perfect cross-browser conformity, and I only had to use one browser hack (the Tantek Çelik box-model hack, which is only for backwards compatibility with an out of date browser (IE5/win) anyway).

The point being that the differences in bowsers are not half as bad as people will have you believe. It's more than possible to create a layout as complex as you could possibly want using no tables, supporting 99% of all conventional browsers. Plus, the added bonusses of designing this way far outweigh the extra half hour or so that you have to spend building the site.

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The overwhelming majority can web design because they own a copy of Dreamweaver, without it they couldn't web design. I believe CSS is the future, but you have to read the css book by http://www.sitepoint.com/books/css1/. Dan Shafer makes it all make sense why tables are just plain antiquated to use tables for layout reasons.

It's pretty clear the purpose for tables is to transmit tabular data intact without losing any data... that's why a site done using tables will show little to nothing when loading, they blurt the whole thing out at once once the table is completely loaded. That's the way they were created... that's the way browsers still treat them.

But my opinion is... if you don't have time/clients appreciation/budget to spend to make your CSS just right... tables are fast to layout and design with.

Regarding search... i recreated a clients site made with extensive tables (by me 1 year earlier) and who was also listed on page 13 for their term. I created a new layout in lean and mean CSS... literally a jump to page 3 in 1 week.

I wish i had it all logged because it still blows me away.

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