Tableless Div Based Design

"Tables are dreary in website design and loosing its identity because of intuitive tableless design."

Tableless web design (or tableless web layout) is web design philosophy eschewing the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

CSS was introduced in December 1996 by the W3C to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational. Around the same time, in the late 1990s, as the dot-com boom led to a rapid growth in the 'new media' of web page creation and design, there began a trend of using HTML tables, and their rows, columns and cells, to control the layout of whole web pages. This was due to several reasons:

• the limitations at the time of CSS support in major browsers;
• the new web designers' lack of familiarity with CSS;
• the lack of knowledge of, or concern for the reasons (including HTML semantics and web accessibility) to use CSS instead of what was perceived as an easier way to quickly achieve the intended layouts, and
• a new breed of WYSIWYG web design tools that encouraged this practice.