Suddenly, your UI looks slightly different! 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. { display: table-row-group} It's about using semantic html. 1 Solution. According to the Mozilla docs: "The calc() CSS function lets you perform calculations when specifying CSS property values. 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. 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. Then some CSS people mentioned that tables were only meant for tabular data and not layout and they started using DIVs for their layouts. So there really is, at least in my opinion, no viable solution that maintains a nicely formatted HTML document and renders the same identical layout when the HTML is minimized. With Best Regards Natarajan R (UI Designer) KAPSYSTEM (International Bulk SM. < table >. but I want to use DIV instead of TABLE: Layout with divs instead of table. Discussion created by Emily Frank on May 29, 2019 Latest reply on Jun 4, 2019 by Emily Frank. This adds to the feeling that using tables is safe. Often it seems that people are moving away from table hell only to wind up in div hell. Using tables for layout is discouraged because it is semantically wrong -- table markup is supposed to be for tables and specifically for tabular data. You can see two editors on the page side by side. [Is there no search box for the forums or am I being stupid?] Since they are both floating to the left, they will display side by side if there’s enough space for both to fit. The following example illustrates the left and right columns having fixed widths and the center column being sized to fit between the two. Myth 1. - 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. All of the solutions are ugly. Which basically means, always test your layout as minimized HTML rather than in a preview editor. Let's compare that with using a float style instead. 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. Your HTML says what something is (e.g. Make sure the cleaning option Replace table tags with divs is enabled. @houfton. Note that we have to use an inner div for the child div. Using divs is not hard, once you learn the techniques. Using tables can make it slightly difficult to rearrange elements on a page. Hmmm, there's another article idea! Formerly, tables were extensively used for web designing. 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. [Is there no search box for the forums or am I being stupid?] Conversely, your text could be pressed up against your image or even superimposed on it. I discovered vanseo design's blog post that solved this problem for me, so what you see here is just a regurgitation of their post. I have not been able to find anything about this. Razvan Pop Member. 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. So both divs and tables are very much suited for this task. And if there's a better way of doing things, please leave a comment! I was just going through some of this DIV vs TABLES stuff. Find answers to Using instead of tables... from the expert community at Experts Exchange Houfton. html - websites - using divs instead of tables . Using div tags instead of tables in HTML emails can result in multiple design issues, including padding problems. Of course, if you have a really smart minimizer that respects whitespace and carriage returns between and around inline-block divs, that would help too. In order to center it, I will explain things slowly. Here's the HTML: Funny how we use the text-align style to align inner HTML elements! Using this HTML: The problem here is that the we're specifying the width of the center region. This makes a kind of sense, as why would you have a scrollbar with content that is vertically centered or at the bottom? Well formed semantic mark-up offers greater accessibility to users on various platforms (such as mobile devices) and allows for greater flexibility, scalability and performance of your Website and its pages. So that's as far as I want to take this today. This is one of the main driving forces behind XHTML. Hey, that’s great. Amazing how many of my peers think I am stuck in 1999 when I use a TABLE for layout. 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! Style your tables using the CSS below. Using DIVs instead of Table (HTML Pages with CSS and JavaScript forum at Coderanch) FAQs Clean the document. Re: Using DIV in Layout instead od Tables Dec 08, 2012 06:38 PM | KathyW | LINK I will add that tables are perfectly valid if the information you are presenting is, in fact, tabular data. 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. In the era of responsive web design the old trend of building websites using HTML tables can't be used anymore. I was referred here from stackoverflow as … 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. This means that code should be meaningful as well as syntactically correct. Columns are not squeezed under other columns as they are in a div-based structure. An example of poo… 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. Back in the 90’s, tables were used for layouts and everyone was happy. How to use divs instead of tables. on the far right the top right of the box isn't floating to the left where it should be? I have not been able to find anything about this. Let's exaggerate this difference between inline-block and float, getting rid of my left margin and removing the editor's indentation: Oh wow. HTML; 14 Comments. I hope you at least had fun reading this and perhaps learned a thing or two. Wondering if anyone can help me adjust a Canvas page using tables with image buttons to a page using div tags in two or three columns. The whole "Tables vs Divs" thing just barely misses the mark. Remove all whitespace and carriage returns between divs. Does it load faster? But wait! By look, I mean the positioning of sections of the UI and the elements within those sections, and by behavior, I mean how the UI behaves when the browser window is resized. So I should be using divs instead of tables for layouts? As we will be using DIVs instead of tables or frames, we need to ensure items ‘wrap’ properly around each other. My principle is to use the method which solves problem on the best way, not use only because of an ideology or because someone (e.g. Makes sense, right? 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). It can be used anywhere a , , ,