Displaying a Django query result in HTML - table, list, css divs?

Question

I am working on an django application that will return what historically was a table of information:

ISSUE  DESCRIPTION  INITIATOR  INITIATEDDATE  ASSIGNEE  FORECASTDATE  STATUS  REMARKS

That will be the entrance point for users to sort / filter, etc the list of issues.
The columns like ISSUE, DATES, NAMES are of relatively fixed width, but others can be a paragraph or more.

What is the best way to render this in HTML? As HTML Tables, lists or with a lot of CSS spans/divs?

I eventually hope to make the issues list sortable or filterable with javascript as well.

Answer 1

If the information you're trying to display is tabular (as it appears to be), then go with tables.

Also, see these questions for even more debate!

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30251/tables-instead-of-divs
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/div-vs-table

Answer 2

The whole argument made by the CSS purists is that you need to keep your code semantically relevant to the information it contains. What you need to show is tabular data and you use the <table> tag to do that. The only "problem" with tables is when they are used to control the layout, like making your two column layout two <td>s as opposed to two <div>s. In this case, however, tables would be adequate.

Answer 3

As both answers say, tabular data should be displayed using a <table> tag.

To put it into perspective, when tables are used to do layout, that is an abuse of the table tag. When div tags are used to do tabular layout, that's abuse in the opposite direction. Don't use one to do the other's job.