Are nested tables evil?

[Adam Atlas]

I don't see what's wrong with nested tables, and a fully CSS-controlled layout will limit browser compatibility.

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

Only 4.x browsers..

[psoTFX]

/me notes that "officially" NS4 and even NS6 have been deemed "dead and buried" by Netscape. Anyone still running NS4.x as their primary or only browser has serious issues that need the skills of a good psychotherapist

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

That means my school. I can't even look at my own website there!

[Adam Atlas]

Ok, fine, but could someone explain what's actually wrong with nested tables?

[dhn]

Ok, fine, but could someone explain what's actually wrong with nested tables?

Semantics. A pretty good analogy is to say you are writing a letter in Excel instead of Word when you are working with nested tables. Believe it or not but semantics are important for browser compatibility, accessibility and even a must for a decent workflow. Just imagine a blind person accessing the web. Did you ever look at the source code for a site completely done it tables? Compare this to the source code of a site like this (ddblog.org, still in development) or this (lambcutlet.org).
Tables are not evil, they just should only be used for what they are good for, tabulated data.

But thanks to M$ I guess it'll take a long time until we will finally have a web which actually will fully benefit from this.

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

At least not until the next Windows, according to the lead IE developer. According to Dvorak, that'll be 2010

[Aexoden]

The problem is that for layouts that don't need overlapping elements (as in almost every design I've ever come up with), tables by accident make a great page layout tool. With a couple of changes, they'd be perfect. Of course, then you lose the whole separating content from layout... but I'd almost rather see a comprehensive layout language, instead of faking it by assigning everything an ID and then styling the ID appropriately. That said, there are only two reasons I'd consider nested tables over CSS at the moment. 1) Browser compatibility (it's no small task to get pixel perfect layouts when the most common browser incorrectly implements the box model, and I hate using that trick.) 2) CSS doesn't yet have a way to vertically center content within a div. If you know the size beforehand, you can do negative margins and do it, but I'm talking about any potentially dynamic content that changes size. It's trivial to do with tables, but CSS dies.

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

That could be a problem, couldn't it.

[bleak]

I help to maintain the Mensa website, which has nested tables in abundance. IMO, the worst thing about nested tables is keeping track of where each one ends.