The old fable of tables vs “pure” CSS is at the centre of a heated flame war (I mean, a discussion) again. This time, due to Ron Garett’s post on his blog. Naturally, the story got picked up on ajaxian and the CSS ‘know-it-alls’ jumped at the chance to rubbish it all without giving the bloke a chance. And a chance he deserves for what he essentially says–and illustrates via examples–is that CSS for layout is too flawed, quirky and not-that-semantic, whereas tables are can be used to organise your data more reliably and easily as the ‘framework’ upon which you build the site, leaving CSS for styling on top.

Worth the read anyway. Like I always say, the best tool for the job. Never shy away from using tables when your project / data structure justifies it. To be fair – I used to prefer table based design until not so long ago when I discovered the benefits of shuffling content via CSS for SEO in order to get the more relevant text further up the source code of the page. And that’s just not something you can muster via tables…