level is defined using an easily recognized name, such as Table, Title, Heading, Row, and Cell. What I've shown here is that you can use divs and tables for layout control equally well, though given that some of div layout requires having the div behave like a table and table cell tends to suggest that using tables is better than divs. Back in the 90’s, tables were used for layouts and everyone was happy. With div tags, you could end up with text too far away from your images. Discussion created by Emily Frank on May 29, 2019 Latest reply on Jun 4, 2019 by Emily Frank. Then some CSS people mentioned that tables were only meant for tabular data and not layout and they started using DIVs for their layouts. The two examples below demonstrate the two approaches. So the difference between the divs using inline-block is because I have spaces in the HTML: See the indentation of my nicely formatted HTML? I have seen divs used in a premium plugin (buddydev’s cosmicbuddy). I agree DIVs are better solution for most cases, but TABLEs are better in case when you need same height for two or more adjacent columns which height depends of content. Amazing how many of my peers think I am stuck in 1999 when I use a TABLE for layout. Participant. This makes a kind of sense, as why would you have a scrollbar with content that is vertically centered or at the bottom? DIV tags are considered the standard method for creating web design layouts by most web designers due to the advantages the DIV tags bring over the TABLE tags. @houfton. While a paragraph creates the same effect, it adds undesirable vertical separation between the two divs. Using tables in design can cause you to have empty elements, and to use spacer images , which are transparent images used just to fill space. To achieve this: Requires treating the divs as table cells! Let's say you want 3 divs where the left and right are of fixed (in pixels) width and the center div resizes based on the browser width. Hi, Yes, it does load faster, but that is not the main reason to go for tableless layout. The following example illustrates the left and right columns having fixed widths and the center column being sized to fit between the two. Tables work only when you want to create a web page. You can simply set the width of the cells and float them to the left and clear the line with every table row. So, when creating a table, all you need to do is, instead of the HTML ‘ table ‘ tag, merely use the ‘ div ‘ tag and add the corresponding CSS to display a table. For instance:

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. Use Divs Instead of Tables on Home Page. The padding is the white space around your images and text. I have not been able to find anything about this. The point being, always test your layout with different browser widths. What we lose though is the ability to vertically align the inner elements; they can still be horizontally aligned. Conversely, your text could be pressed up against your image or even superimposed on it. Note that we have to use an inner div for the child div. The profile-fields loop in bp-default uses a table layout. And here's the final output: I hope this article provides a useful lesson--using CSS and not table tags will great reduce the amount of code that you have to write. Because of the ability to use vertical centering in tables, it is a somewhat popular technique to use a single-celled table with both horizontal and vertical centering to absolutely center your page content in a browser window (mostly only useful for fixed-size content). Using divs instead of tables in Profiles layout. The main side effect is that changing the number of the columns you need to adjust the width of the cells. Let's compare that with using a float style instead. Here's the HTML: Notice the space between the columns? An example of poo… Active 8 years ago. So for that reason we have used float:left;. I was just going through some of this DIV vs TABLES stuff. DIV/CSS allows designers to change the entire look and fill of the website by only … 2019 Update: I keep this post in place because for some unknown reason it has always done extremely well on Google searches, generating a gratifyingly large number of visits.I guess it explains the subject well and formatting HTML-based columns using DIV tags was an entry-level skill back in the day. With divs, the developer must use the style attribute or an external style sheet, because the div tag doesn’t have any attributes attached to it. Websites written using DIV/CSS are considered to be coded cleaner on the other hand improperly nested TABLEs can increase page size and weight. { display: table-row-group} How to use divs instead of tables. Houfton. You have to use div tags and style them as required. I was referred here from stackoverflow as … chrissp26 asked on 2004-06-08. A few divs, knowing how to float and clear, can do the trick with a lot less markup than a table. Makes sense, right? I hope you at least had fun reading this and perhaps learned a thing or two. Table based layouts are more complex and Difficult to update and maintain. As we will be using DIVs instead of tables or frames, we need to ensure items ‘wrap’ properly around each other. As with divs, let's see if we can get scrolling to work in a column. Messages: 43 Likes Received: 1 Best Answers: 0 Trophy Points: 43 #2. but I want to use DIV instead of TABLE: Layout with divs instead of table. HTML; 14 Comments. Over the last several years, developers have moved from table-based website structures to div-based structures. This article demonstrates using div elements to effectively build websites without using table elements on a page. Style your tables using the CSS below. This is what we are aiming for, so you can see where we are headed: So we will go ahead and create a basic HTML5 pagelayout but define a few classes on the way. Your HTML says what something is (e.g. We used the css below for our demo table you can see above. In order to center it, I will explain things slowly. Using div & CSS instead of Tables. Active 2 years, 1 month ago. I feel validated! 12 February 2008. [Is there no search box for the forums or am I being stupid?] Using this naming method makes it a lot easier to figure out what each level of the table is supposed to do. Don't worry if you're looking for other settings, you can set these in the next step. Then some CSS people mentioned that tables were only meant for tabular data and not layout and they started using DIVs for their layouts. The two top reasons for using Divs instead of Tables are 1) Divs fill whatever horizontal space is available and 2) they require less code. To clear the haze around divs and tables, let’s discuss the myths and facts revolving around the topic. The number 206 comes from the left and right divs being 100 pixels each, plus 1 pixel for the borders for each div: 100 + 100 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 206. Here's the HTML for a simple layout (note I'm using float): If we try to use inline-block with float, the center auto-margin is ignored. Razvan Pop Member. Also, some of the wonky things like using the calc()function are not necessary with tables. Each has a web part zone and takes 1/3 of the total width of the parent div. The first has been built using table tags while the other is made with styled DIVs. All of these examples can be coded in Visual Code and viewed side-by-side with Quick HTML Previewer, which of all the HTML preview plugins that I looked at is the only one that I found actually works. And if there's a better way of doing things, please leave a comment! I'm not covering things like device screen sizes or replacing a menu bar with a "triple bar" dropdown -- there are component libraries like Bootstrap to handle that. The problem is when I try to add a web part to each of 3 zones, the 3rd zone gets shifted down to the next row, as shown below. The one on the left is a visual editor where you can compose the … The CSS for this table uses a few special properties and a little clever formatting. Classic HTML tables don't require an additional stylesheet in order to display the grid layout but Div tags do. What is the advantage of using div instead of table? So that's as far as I want to take this today. Here, the auto style and the col elements come into play. Copy and convert any visual table document to Div tables with a simple click of a button. 8 years, 8 months ago. Let's exaggerate this difference between inline-block and float, getting rid of my left margin and removing the editor's indentation: Oh wow. I have not been able to find anything about this. This could technically be done in div boxes, but it's much, much easier to do this in tables, and one can argue that label:textbox pairs are in fact tabular in nature. Forums . CSS for Div Tables. Using a table-less structure is great for SEO as it allows engines to read your content easier instead of being blocked by bloated table code. So that's as far as I want to take this today. Clean the document. Editors. In this case replacing the content is not going to be enough, you'll have to add a CSS code to the stylesheet of your website. They do fit because we have two .float-child divs, each at 50% width. was the generally accepted way of doing this but using display:table, as shown in one This is the sort of exploratory, compare-and-contrast work that I sometimes can't commit the time (or find the willpower) to take upon myself. You can find many different alternatives to this approach online, but this basic approach will serve you well. Formerly, tables were extensively used for web designing. To position the divs side by side, we are using the float property to float each .float-child element to the left. The preference for not using tables for layout is also semantic: tables are for, well tables: tables of data, tables of pictures, tables of related information. Participant. Let's read what official recommendation for tables from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/tables.htm… a table, a paragraph, or a generic text division) CSS is just instructions for displaying it. Even the div tag plays only a small part in a well laid out page. I am trying to create a custom layout page which has 3 colums with purely divs. It's not "table" or "div". For our use case, we needed the month calendar to scale with screen width and collapse into a stacked layout on mobile. Don't overuse it. 8 years, 8 months ago. Which basically means, always test your layout as minimized HTML rather than in a preview editor. This is an important behavioral difference! What I've shown here is that you can use divs and tables for layout control equally well, though given that some of div layout requires having the div behave like a table and table cell tends to suggest that using tables is better than divs. [Is there no search box for the forums or am I being stupid?] Try, Not! Scroll down to find the requred code at the bottom of this page and adjust it if it's necessary. Ask Question Asked 7 years, 4 months ago. Do developers know the reasons for moving to div-based structures, and do they know _how_ to? If we look to the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) for guidelines on how to use HTML properly, the use of semantic mark-up is always strongly recommended. The only solution I found (after perusing SO) is to use the calc style: Since this calculation is so dependant on the number of divs in the "row", I decided to put this in as an actual style rather than as CSS. Given this HTML: We can resize the width of the browser window and we see: But wait! It's about using semantic html. Back in the 90’s, tables were used for layouts and everyone was happy. And of course, there's no preview editor that I know of that will minimize your HTML before feeding it to the browser. Let's start with something basic -- two inline divs. - Master Yoda, Last Visit: 31-Dec-99 19:00     Last Update: 28-Dec-20 11:08, Lesson 1 - Your Editor Is Messing With Your Head, Lesson 2 - Your Minimizer Will Mess With Your Head Too, Using the Article Editor (without losing your hair in handfuls), Workarounds for Code Project's Text Editor. So this works because we're creating divs that simulate table cells, which is a natural lead in to the next section, doing the same thing with tables. The HTML: Looks pretty much the same, right? This adds to the feeling that using tables is safe. 1 Solution. Since they are both floating to the left, they will display side by side if there’s enough space for both to fit. From here and here, they are: And my favorite driving-the-porcelain-bus solution: OK then. Using table-styled divs instead of tables. So you've created the perfect layout in your editor and then you run a minimizer which potentially removes the whitespace and carriage returns between your divs. Suddenly, your UI looks slightly different! Comparing and contrasting UI layout using divs vs. tables, "Try?! We are going to create a ‘standard’ web page layout – with a header, a left side navigation, a content area and a footer. The result is: The scrollbar goes away if the height of the child's inner div is less than the child div. W3C) says it is cool. We can get some bizarre effects. All of the solutions are ugly. The padding is the white space around your images and text. Using divs instead of tables. Transform traditional HTML Tables to Div Tables. Even the carriage return between the inline-block divs is adding a space: Notice the space before the second div has now been removed: Your lovely HTML indentation, and in particular, the auto-indenting that your editor is doing for you, is affecting your layout using inline-block! Ask Question Asked 8 years ago. A lot of times, you'll see a div that has a scrollbar when the content exceeds the height. Find answers to Using instead of tables... from the expert community at Experts Exchange I will explain it step-by-step, but first here’s the code snippet: The HEAD Section Nothing ground-breaking at the top of this code: we simply start a HTML… Because there are a number of advantages to the div element, most clients ask designers to develop websites using div elements rather than table elements. With div tags, you could end up with text too far away from your images. According to the Mozilla docs: "The calc() CSS function lets you perform calculations when specifying CSS property values. To deal with this, we need to clear the float elements on the left and right:. Ask Question Asked 7 years, 7 months ago. Often it seems that people are moving away from table hell only to wind up in div hell. The cell padding is another available option. This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL), General    News    Suggestion    Question    Bug    Answer    Joke    Praise    Rant    Admin. HTML (note I'm using the element CSS described above to set the border for the table, tr, th, and td elements): This resulting in the center column resizing as the browser width is increased / decreased while the left and right columns remain fixed width. However, things have changed and web pages are no longer designed through tables. Riiiight. I hope you at least had fun reading this and perhaps learned a thing or two. Within reason, of course! For now, let's just deal with the practical issues, otherwise known as WTF??? The 4 simple steps: Paste your table in the editor. < table >. Most of the time, I need layout options that include being able to position an entire section to the left, center, and/or right of the page as well as position the elements within those sections on the left, center, right and top, middle, or bottom. Do... Or DO NOT!!" Myth 1. Houfton. Thanks for sharing this comprehensive, in-depth article on Web UI using CSS & HTML. And if there's a better way of doing things, please leave a comment! It doesn't even add the borders of the cells, it just aligns the elements correctly. Using tables can make it slightly difficult to rearrange elements on a page. The syntax higlighting and the text indenter of the code editor let you preview the markup. This means that code should be meaningful as well as syntactically correct. The result works nicely regardless of browser window width: Not ideal with this magic number, and compare this to the solution using tables. on the far right the top right of the box isn't floating to the left where it should be? It gives the borders to the cells and highlights the header and footer. If there is a solution, I haven't found it. This feature of the HTML Cleaner offers you a simple way to replace all table tags with div tags having the correct classes. Despite their status as mortal enemies, divs and tables can work together if you need them to. scripting_semantics 2009-05-07 00:51:30 UTC #18 So both divs and tables are very much suited for this task. { display: table-header-group } < tbody >. html - websites - using divs instead of tables . Because of the ability to use vertical centering in tables, it is a somewhat popular technique to use a single-celled table with both horizontal and vertical centering to absolutely center your page content in a browser window (mostly only useful for fixed-size content). Using div tags instead of tables in HTML emails can result in multiple design issues, including padding problems. The HTML: And the CSS I'm using to define the border, width, margin, and inline styles: If you want some in depth reading about the two, I suggest Ternstyle's blog entry and Thoughtbot's blog entry. Let's see how that's done using the overflow-y and height styles. A little different width and we get: This effect is the result of the inner right div's height forcing the inner-center text at the bottom to not be able to extend the full width of the center div. Contrast this with the approach described in the section on divs, particularly note that the height when using divs was specified as 100% while here, it's specified as the column height, 100 pixels matching the outer tr height. Hey, that’s great.