The Internet has matured alot since it’s inception. It has under gone many changes and today we are seeing some amzing things done with various Internet technologies. One of the key factor in this vast amount of rich and interactive data is Web Standards.

Web standards have allowed us to transmit and share data in reliable and predictable ways. Semantics is a component of Standards, although not as important as a defined structure for the data, that describes the data it contains. Semantics, in many ways, is about common sense. It makes sense to expect a paragraph tag (<p>) to contain a paragraphic of text. It would also make sense to expect a table to contain a grid or table of data. So why are tables used for layouts?

That in and of it’s self is a very interesting question. While the we have made great advances there are still some areas that are a little slow in catching on, for whatever reason. One area is XHTML. While the XHTML specifiaction has been out for years there are still many developers using HTML 4. I was even talking to a fellow developer the other day and a company he is working with still has the bulk of their web work in HTML 3.2, the horror!

Perhaps it is the fact that Internet Explorer still doesn’t correctly support the XHTML mime type (XML application) that developers have asked, “Why bother?” Or perhaps some just don’t see the benefit in making the switch. Now to be clear I am not saying we have to go back and convert evry website or application we have ever written but at least any new development should be in XHTML.

Why bother? Well, for me anyways, one big reason is Google. The search engine giant is favoring semantic and clean markup in it’s page indexing. So a little extra effort when writing your markup can have big payoffs down the road.

So back to the question of why tables for layouts. Well there are many arguments like tabled layouts take longer to load and are less favorable to search engines, which are probably true. Ultimately every developer must choose for themselves. Believe me if I could cram tableless layouts and semantics down everyones throats I would. I am tired of working on projects that someother person has banaided together with horrible markup and then trying to repair the damage (or at least just figure out what is going on). Whether it is that you’re comfotatble with tables or you think that it is easier just bite the bullet, switch to semantic markup and use tables for what they were made for, tabular data. You’ll be glad you did, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not while your cursing my very existence as you piece together your first layout then look at it in IE6, but someday you will thank me!

Cheers.