JP Keisala's personal blog.

I’m re-designing my little portfolio site and I came up again problem how should layout HTML? Should I use tables or div’s?

Tables are very easy way to layout page and every webmonkey like me used to layout pages with tables in nineties.

<table>
	<tr>
		<td colspan="2">navigation</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>Left navigation</td>
		<td>Body navigation</td>
	</tr>
</table>

Or should I do it with div’s? It would be right way but I have to spend 3 times more time to get pixels in place by writing everything clean and semantic way.

	<div id="navigation">xxxx</div>
	<div id="contents">xxxx</div>
	<div id="secondnavigation">xxxx</div>

Well, I don’t know why I’m even writing this because I’m standards geek and I rather use 10 times more time to get code looking good. It’s kind of useless anyway to make my page in DIV’s because only real thing what I gain in it is better indexing for search engines. Other benefits are irrelevant; I can bet that there are only web browsers IE5.x, Mozilla or NS6.x which comes to my site. No mobile phones, speech devices, dvd players etc. Just browsers so why should I really care how my page looks to or sounds to text-to-speech programs or Nokia phone.