CSS for layout

[canmandom]

Ok: It appears that I must be missing something. It is My understanding that tables are not to be used for the creation of site layouts anylonger. That is to say the forms or interfaces that are so prevelant in the backend of web sites. For an example of what I am talking about you could look at the admin section for the candypress shoping cart at candypress.com. I have also been looking at the source code of any number of sites and I am finding a mixture of <div's> <tr> and <td> for the positioning of elements. What am I missing here are table rows and table data elements acceptable for layout which is basically using a table or not.

I have been beating My head in trying to modifiy a site to meet standards by eleminating tables and there componates and converting them to CSS. If table rows and table data is acceptable why the move against tables. What is it that I am missing?

[boogyman]

tables were never meant for layouts, and at the time, CSS was also a very new "language".

There are still many web-developer professionals who (sadly) prefer to use tables. The push against using them that way is because as above they were never meant to be used as a site layout schema, but rather for statistical / "tabular" data.

Just as with everything else, both have their pros and cons, and in my opinion, the push against tables is coming partly due to the advancement in the web as a whole. back in 1995, and even in 98/99, the internet was primarily used in a desktop-like environment, with an external monitor n such...

One of the pro's about style sheets is that you can apply different "layouts" depending on what type of application is accessing the data... with tables, the "layout" is very re-stricted because of the inherent footprint structure, where divs offer a wider range of scope, and can easily be manipulated to appear wider / taller / or visa versa, and even not appear at all... attempting to take out the "left column" on a table structure is very difficult, and labor intensive, however if done properly with css and divs (or ul for nav etc...) making the "navigation" invisible and expanding the page content involves 2 maybe 3 line changes.