Got inspired by a news post from StudioC. His/her xoopsfactory site loads very fast (on my machine) and has a very clean design. It uses only div tags, no tables. I never looked at divs this way. Guess I always used tables and didn't look further if there were any more possibilities to make a site layout. On the xoopsfactory site I also found a link to a very intresting site called theimposter. It shows some examples of how to create your site layout using only divs and some css code. It really impressed me, because I think it saves a lot of htmlcode by just using divs instead of very much tables.

Maybe I can get some more opinions on this. If I see the possibilities of the div tags vs. the tables tags, I think you can accomplish almost the same with both, but the div tags do it in a cleaner way. Is this correct? Should I use divs now instead of tables?
Are tables really 'dead'? Is the div taking over these days?

Please give me your 2cents on this. Thanks!

Another sites about CSS and Div techniques.

Go Here

wammes:

You've hit one of the most hot topics of these turbulent times: the old tables vs. CSS design debate.

Once upon a time, I tried to build a CSS theme for XOOPS. It almost worked, though I had to add here and there a few tweaks for the theme to work in some browsers.

However, I was unable to do certain things: for instance, if you use DIVs to create your right column, you can do it but not including a background color, because the DIV's height will be dictated by its content. Recently a solution was published in A list apart, using a background image, and this solution is perfect if you always have a right column... but not when you don't have one (you'd need to define a different background image for those cases where the rightcolumn doesn't exist. It's doable but haven't had the time to go after this one.

Back to tue subject, I think that for the moment the sensible approach is the one preached by Jeffrey Zeldman in his book Designing with Web Standards. He says there that as long as browsers support of standards is flaky, an intelligent way of doing business is to go after transitional, hybrid designs, that is, designs that use XHTML and CSS but not defined as strict.

Zeldman argues, and I'm inclined to follow him in this, that there's really no solid reason not to build a site using a table here and there. Of course there will always be a place for tables: the presentation of tabular data, for one thing. But also, if the present state of CSS support doesn't let you build the site you envision, throw away purity and use a table. Your site can still validate if you're careful, and you might avoid many a headache.

As you can see in the default theme supplied with XOOPS, this is the general approach followed here. The theme is built with a few tables, but all the styling of the blocks is done via DIVs. This will become easier and better when XOOPS core gains the capability of importing external stylesheets, and when module and theme designers complement the task by doing their job thinking about a clear separation of structural markup and presentational styling.

Cheers.

I would go with

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