Divs vs Tables for a user generated blog site.

Question

Exact duplicate of

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30251/tables-instead-of-divs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135826/for-tabular-data-what-renders-faster-css-or-table http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-for-layout-in-html

I have hired a programmer and a web designer to make a website similar to Stackoverflow. (Different topic of course!) It's a blog site with mostly user generated content.

The programmer wanted to make the site using Divs only while the designer was comfortable using tables. The designer has tried to use Divs only and his response is that "it's hard to create separate style sheets that work on individual browsers and then try to set up a method to make the browsers properly load them." He wants to go back to using tables instead while the programmer insists that Divs are the way to go for a site like this.

Who is right here? For a site similar to Stackoverflow, is it better to use Divs or Tables? And would using both be a solution that would work?

Answer 1

DIVs are a faster and cleaner way to maintain site templates and structure. So tomorrow if you redesign your site the only change you make is to a CSS file, and not the entire codebase. Again maintaining a table based design gets trickier and consumes a lot of time for a programmer, and, is quite a lot faster (requires less expertise and less professional tools) for the designer.

The world is moving to DIVs. DIVS did to website design what MP3 did to music.

Answer 2

See:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30251/tables-instead-of-divs
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135826/for-tabular-data-what-renders-faster-css-or-table
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-for-layout-in-html

Answer 3

There's not much to add here. But a rule of thumb that I follow is that I table only for real tabular data within the content and not for anything related to the layout the layout.