I’ve been a table-free web designer for the past 4 years now. However, the past few weeks have seen me crawling little by little back to using tables for formatting.

Why? The problem is, that in some cases, tables really are practical. For example, look at Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.org) and Deal Catcher (http://dealcatcher.com). The sites display perfectly in both high and low resolution screens. They are effective designs, especially considering that they are probably the two sites I visit most each day (besides gmail). Now, what about all that separation of content and design? Well, I’ve been thinking and that’s exactly what XML feeds are for, no? But list-like sites can use tables pretty effectively to optimize screen space across a spectrum of resolutions.

I’m beginning to feel that instead of having an overwhelming zeal against tables like I used to, I ought to take a more moderate stance and accept situations under which I might actually consider tables in my design.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.