Heathbits

I just joined Facebook last week and joined their ‘Web Design’ group a few days ago. One of the Topics posted there was:

Div or Table - If you was going to teach a newbie web design, would you start with teaching TABLE or DIV layouts?

The overwhelming response was: “Use Tables!”. Excuse me, but WTF?????? I’ve been doing web design for the last 12 years and I thought this dispute had been put to rest about 4+ years ago! You use tables for data and divs for layout! Why would someone encourage a newbie to learn to do this the wrong way??? My only conclusion is that the ‘Web Design’ group is full of amateur web designer wanna-be’s or I have no idea what I am talking about….

Here is the link to the discussion on Facebook in case any of you are a member of that group.

Here is what I responded with:

Tables are made for data!!! You DO NOT EVER use tables for a layout. I cannot believe so many people on this post have suggested such a thing! If you use tables for a layout, you are writing invalid HTML/XHTML. Ever heard of W3C Valid XHTML/HTML and CSS???? Table layout design is a hallmark of an armature web designer and has been out dated for years! Bottom line, you are not a real web designer if you’re using tables to create your website layouts (no professional web design firm will hire you if you design like this). This is undisputed. Everyone from Jeffrey Zeldman to Eric Myers to the W3C will tell you this. Hey, if you want to learn how to become a web designer, how about learning to do it the right way? Use Divs… that’s what they are meant for.