Thanks for reading and your additional comments for our readers…Excellent points!

It doesn’t matter if you use tabled-based navigation in your HTML, at least not from an SEO/search crawler perspective; the main argument I hear against tables is that they’re harder to style and offer less options than empty divs or divs built around list HTML.

“When it comes to HTML code istelf, the latest iteration is 4.0, though 5.0 is in progress.”

There is also XHMTL, which is like HTML except its rules are a lot stricter.

“…but don’t go hog wild and start using code that isn’t tested and proven.”

But if you go hog wild anyway, HTML that isn’t tested and proven generally won’t work, so the worst that will happen is your site won’t display the way you intended it to, and/or it will fail HTML validation.

Found your blog on the Interwebs today and I really like it; keep up the good work.

Hi Corey,
Thanks for taking your time to leave such a long and well though out comment for our readers. I agree with you but I think the point here is if a human, non search engine spider can find a good user experience, purchase the intended product, etc. then the code is not that big of an issue…

Of course, the code should be clean and should adhere to standards from an on site optimziation perspective but really, 99.9% of human visitors have no idea what clean code is…

Anyway, thanks again for reading and your comment!

There’s a very important visitor that looks at nothing but the HTML source of a given page– the search engine spider.

Code that is disorganized, is not standards-based, or does not adhere to W3C standards requires spiders to make educated guesses at the content, meaning, and structure of a page, rather than interpreting well-marked up, semantic code.

Messy code also tends to produce ‘code bloat’ and larger file sizes, which can directly affect performance. There are more than a few hints that the speed at which a page is delivered will be playing an increasingly important role in rankings moving forward.

Finally, the ‘drunken monkey’ code that you’re referring to is, by its nature, harder to maintain and more susceptible to browser-specific bugs or display inconsistencies.

Producing anything of lasting value, whether an enterprise web application or a simple static web page, requires the knowledge and discipline to follow best practices and consistently adhere to standards. This approach transcends any particular technology or technique, and lets you be proud of the result from any perspective– whether under the hood or on the surface.

Corey Ehmke
Chief Solutions Architect, SEO Logic

As long search engines can discern the text and visitors can get the information, it doesn’t matter if it’s coded in CSS or tables.