Don’t use that TABLE.

Back in the 90s, the web was an anarchy concerning the way browsers worked or the way websites were coded. CSS barely had any value and Flash was believed to be the ultimate webdesign experience. Then ergonomics came into the picture. A person’s attention had to be captured in 7 seconds. The underlying idea was to give out an interesting and fully loaded page in 7 seconds. At the time we were all using 56k/s modems and 7 seconds were believed to be short. We now have DSL lines and 7 seconds seem to be ages to wait for a page to load compared to the milliseconds a page like Google’s home takes.

The problem got partly solved when web standards got introduced. Why web standards and how ?

Most webdesigners, myself included, have a graphic arts background. Let’s make things clear right here. IT lectures do exist and arts and design lectures also. However, the bridging between the two is inexistant. Webdesigners think in pictures and not in code. This is where the first webdesign attempts went wrong. Having nothing to hold the pictures together, webdesigners had to turn towards the next best solution available: TABLE.

The benefit of TABLE was that it allowed the arranging of boxes themselves holding images. It was “tight”. Our strictly visual mentality was satisfied about it and we would be boasting about our (visual) achievements while throwing semantics, accessibility and all the other issues out of the window without solving them. This is where web standards get into the picture.

The web standards, called “recommendations” by the World Wide Web Consortium, is the general term used to define the formal (and accepted) technical best practices of designing and developing websites. The methods provided and recommended by the Consortium cover all aspects of webdesigning going from the most basic HTML elements to Javascripting and CSS. HTML and CSS are no longer pariahs in the IT world as the standards guide them and they are not just a means to an end without grasping their nature and their use. All in all, web standards stand at the limit of separating content from style and presentation from structure.

Today, most modern browsers support a vast majority of those standards. Standards give designers the possibility of controlling every visual element on a page without having to hack the core nature of the code (which was the case for TABLE). This is the beginning of semantics. CSS coupled to the right use of HTML tags create better structure, respecting headers for example is important, and, most of all, cuts down the use of custom style tags and selectors in the code (this is the case with table cells for example). This lightens up the whole thing and accelerates page loading time.

TABLE is widely used in the Mauritian context. When analysing most of the mauritian major companies’ corporate websites we can see that TABLE is still used and nearly none is compliant. This practice hinders web evolution and weighs a lot on the Mauritian DSL offer. For those not aware of this: bandwidth is usally sold packed to a website. The problem of heavy websites is that if the packaged bandwidth is consumed, two solutions are offered: the drastic site shutdown by the host or surplus bandwidth charges which are usually very expensive.