Named and Shamed
A crusade against table based design
On this page are those companies who either stupidly PAY other web developers who STILL write their sites in an archaic format or have developers that write in the same said format. Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the web developer world, I am talking about TABLE LAYOUT DESIGN. I hate it, it isn't just a site design thing or some other nonsensical developer ideal, it just isn't needed. From a developer standpoint, looking at someone's site, which has a table based design, is a headache.
Don't believe me?
Ok, display your webpage in source code form, for Firefox users either right click your page -> View Page Source or in the menu bar click View -> Page Source, IE users again right click -> View Source or in the menu bar click View -> Source.
Now, if you have a table based layout you will see a load of <td>, </td>, <tr>, </tr> tags and inside those tags will have other tags like <h1>, <img src="blah.gif" />, <div> etc etc instead of what I have (again do the above to see the source). Massive difference, no?
This is because I use CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) to style or layout my website, I only use HTML tags for content, rather than layout. There is only one instance you should use table tags and that is for tabulated data, as I have in my GP2X page.
There are other reasons why tables shouldn't be used to layout pages:
- increases page size
- slower loading speed
Why should you care about this? Well, if I did this page in table based design, it could hit about 50kb rather than the 5kb it is now. Each empty cell in a table costs you 1kb because it has a blank gif in it. The increased page size also increases bandwidth load. Think about it. If 100 people click on your page that is 50kb (without the pictures) that is 5mb wasted and that is without adding the total of each picture, scripts and other bits times 100, however if it is now 5kb only 500kb is used (again before adding pictures etc).
Ok, so 90% is typically on broadband, but we aren't on Japanese speeds (roughly 40-odd mega-bit). We, as in the British Isles, are barely scratching 2mb. Try loading a site with table design and then one with CSS. I'm betting the CSS one will load noticably quicker.
Anyway, I don't want to rant on and on like some overused Duracell battery.
Every so often, I will find a table based website and re-write it to CSS standards. Any that I find will be documented below with how to's on how the site can be rewritten.
What you do with the data is up to you. You can either:
- Ignore it or..
- Use the code to re-write your site
