CSS or Tables   

What is CSS?
CSS stands for cascading style sheets. They are the new technology used to layout and style web pages.

So what happened to old, trusty tables?
For long tables were the only tool available to the web developers to layout their web pages. But with CSS support becoming common, you now have a choice. Both have their strong and weak points, some more than others as you will soon see.

The advantages of tables.
1. Tables have been much longer than CSS, so even today it is easier to find someone who can do a layout in tables. 2. Most of the WYSIWYG editors output table driven layout. 3. CSS support can be buggy, especially in older browsers. So your web pages may display differently in different browsers.

The advantages of CSS.
1. Tables were never designed for layout. So you can get only limited control over layout with tables. CSS is designed for layout. With CSS you can get pixel level control. 2. CSS decouples design from content. So it makes it easier to enforce a standard look and feel across your website. 3. If later you want to change your sites style, it can be as easy as changing one import statement and using external CSS. 4. With nested CSS, pages become large unnecessarily. Moreover until the whole tables is downloaded no part of it can be shown. This leads to a slow website.

So give me the lowdown on this. Which one is better?
With CSS support becoming common, there is no compelling reason to prefer tables. With CSS you get much more control and flexibility. So unless you are unwilling to spend time learning CSS, upgrade to CSS. Today!

Recent article: CSS Articles
CSS Content? Using tables within the content of your page is a major no-no, the whole intent and purpose of CSS is to control the style of your page elements, this is done using an external stylesheet.

An external Stylesheet? External stylesheets give you the control of your whole website from one single file rather than trying to edit your whole websites CSS using global search and replace or by opening each page individually.

If you are new to this HTML malarkey then welcome, you have just embarked upon a new learning curve that does not take too long to master. Before the invention of CSS everything within a webpage used to be designed using tables.

Indeed there are still a lot of html editors out there that still use tables to format a pages content, one strong word of advice, get rid of that software and start again. Tables are not extinct within webpages but they should only be used for the purpose of presenting data.

Beginning CSS? I am not going to use this article to give you a whole list of tags and how to apply them, that information would be too easily ignored. There are thousands of well rounded websites available on the net today that can walk you through the first stages of CSS, the one I would recommend would be: W3Schools CSS intro this is a perfect place to start learning CSS, in the interests of parity and fairness I will also recommend What can be achieved using CSS .