CSS Or Tables: Is The Argument Over?
Ever since the turn of the millennium web designers have been arguing over CSS and tables. Tables, of course, are the old way of doing things. CSS is the new way. But if there any afforded advantage to using CSS over tables?
Talk to someone like Chromatic and the answer is yes. Talk to someone like Decloak, however, and the answer is a resounding No.
I’m no designer, however, so I can’t speak from personal experience on every single point. I will make the observation that Chromatic’s arguments seem to be focused on what is best or easiest for the designer and not for the client. There is one point he makes, though, that I will disagree with entirely. CSS is not better for SEO.
He says in plain black and white, that CSS is better for search engine optimization. But is it really? Let’s take a look at his arguments:
He says that CSS makes your file sizes smaller. Not inherently. Have you seen some of those CSS files? Some of them are huge. But he is right when he says that smaller file sizes make it easier for the spiders to crawl your site. But using CSS doesn’t necessarily mean that all your files will be smaller in size.
You do want to keep your code-to-content ratio as low as possible. But just because you code your web pages in table doesn’t mean that you have a lot of “junk markup”.
CSS can make it easier for search engines to determine font sizes and colors, but note that browsers all act differently with regard to those elements. What is more important than spider issues is user experience and CSS can interfere with user experience.
One of the classic arguments about CSS is page load time. A faster page load time does translate into more authority for your website, but that isn’t necessarily an optimization issue. When it comes to on-page SEO, CSS affords no special advantages to tables. You can have great on-page search engine optimization with tables and CSS. While CSS might give you advantages in other ways, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the advantage where SEO is concerned.
3 Responses to “CSS Or Tables: Is The Argument Over?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Hi Nick. Thanks for mentioning us. I just want to clarify something:
Comparing a CSS-based website to a table-based website (the exact same website, just different methods of page coding), 9 times out of 10 the file size of the CSS website is going to be smaller.
Assuming one is using external CSS files, the style information (CSS) is separated from the content (HTML or XHTML). Compare that to a site using a strictly table-based layout, and you’ve got a page with both the style information and the layout information meshed together. Let’s not forget that you’re essentially loading the same style information on each page, whereas on a CSS-based website, you’re only loading the CSS stylesheet once.
It is for this reason alone that a CSS-based version of a website will load faster than a table-based version. It is also for this reason that CSS is better for SEO than tables – the page load times are faster because the file sizes are almost always smaller when comparing two identical websites using a CSS-based layout VS a table-based layout.
Going a little deeper, here is an interesting article about Google preferring Valid CSS/XHTML over the non-valid versions. Food for thought.
Looking forward to hearing any additional thoughts on this.
Thanks Matt for the additional clarification and other helpful articles for our readers…
I think what he meant by making the file sizes smaller is that all the formatting code is in the CSS file and not in the html files. There will be class=”example1″ code in the html file, but none of the tag customizations that stay in the CSS file.