HTML tables … should of course only be used to present tabular data, [not] to layout your pages. Use CSS instead. Of course, this hasn't always been that easy, but it sure is now.
Shameful confession: I’ve never been convinced that using tables just for layout is wrong in principle. I do it in Word all the time, where I need to create close approximations of printed forms, and where text boxes and frames have their own drawbacks. There’s no good reason not to use CSS now, but 20 years ago it was a very different story. I remember reading a lot of advice which said that developers wouldn’t use CSS till browsers supported it and vice versa, so there was no point in learning it. I’m glad that advice turned out to be wrong but it sounded very plausible at the time. Interesting post, though, and I’ve bookmarked the link to the web book.
@artkavanagh it’s not wrong. But I think you should avoid using them for anything if you want your site or webapp to be responsive.
@hjertnes Very good point. There are few things as annoying as scrolling sidways to try to read the contents of a table cell.
@artkavanagh And if you want software to understand your content, it can become very wrong to use tables. This includes screen reader software for instance.
So I would say using tables for layout is something best left for the internet archive. 😉