graceful css degradation

Question

I am working on a personal website. On the front page, I have a listing of all the articles, and their date published. This data would be a perfect use for a table tag. The table would only be used to display this tabular data.

I worked on it again, and was able to achieve the same layout using unordered lists and a little bit of css.

So now I got two versions, both look the same (ie and ff), so whats the problem? I want the page to degrade as gracefully as possible.

I view the tabled page without the stylesheets, and everything degrades nice. When I degrade the table-less page, it looks ok.. but clearly the tabled page degrades more nicely.

also, in lynx, the tabled version looks a lot better then the table-less version.

The question is - Are tables justified in this case? (I believe so). Should I go with the table-less layout now that I have one? or is the table better for degradation purposes?

Edit - Ive been brainwashed to think tables are the anti-christ

Answer 1

It's no big deal, if you want them to degrade to tables, use tables. This whole no-tables-deal is about proper semantics, not avoiding them altogether.

If you consider your data to belong in a table put it in one.

But do expect me to come after you with a pitchfork if you use tables for formatting ;)

Answer 2

If the data is a table, then use a table. That's what they are meant for.

The whole "no tables" thing is more about avoiding tables for purposes other than showing tables e.g. the whole layout of a page.

Answer 3

Html tables are for .. tables of data, the css point is just not to use them for layout of the site, its fine (and expected) to use tables to display tabled data.

Answer 4

As it has been mentioned already, tables are not inherently evil, but bad form and reminiscent of the Good Old Web(r) when it was the only way to accomplish some fancy formatting.

Nowadays non-CSS capable browsers are almost statistical noise.

The only reason to use and to avoid going the CSS way is outlined in twiki.org (taken originally from wikipedia)

Even when the availability of CSS capable browsers made CSS a viable technology, the adoption of CSS was still held back by designers' struggles with browsers' incorrect CSS implementation and patchy CSS support. Even today, these problems continue to make the business of CSS design more complex and costly than it should be, and cross-browser testing remains a necessity. Other reasons for continuing non-adoption of CSS are:

• its complexity,
• inertia and authors' lack of familiarity with CSS and required techniques,
• poor support from authoring tools,
• the risks posed by inconsistency between browsers and the increased costs of testing,
• and less frequently a requirement to deliver consistent appearance even to users of ancient non-CSS-capable browsers.

Most, if not all, of this points are already a thing of the past. Nowadays, it's strengths far out win it's perceived problems.

Unless you are expecting a lot of links & friends to be browsing your site expecting to see a table based layout -which I personally don't, and I use links quite a lot ;)-, then go with tables.