HTML Tables or DIVs: Which is Preferred?
The good old HTML table tag has been with us for a long time. Web designers use it for layout and tabular data. It is reliable; it is easy to get it working in all browsers and for those that want structure and order in their code the table tag is their best friend. There is another option available for Web designers that can do everything a table does and more: the DIV tag.
The DIV tag is harder to master when working with tabular layout and it is more difficult to get it pixel perfect in all browsers. The good news is that the knowledge to work with tabular DIVs is accessible and it takes only few hours to master the basics. The DIV tag has one advantage over the table tag, which is accessibility. Using DIV blocks, a Web site designer can control the order in which other computers read content and that includes text-to-word readers.
An interesting question to ask is which method is more popular, the table tag or the DIV? Well, this is a tough question to answer since the DIV tag serves very general purpose in layout, blocks and boxes on Web pages.
Related data:
On the Web sites, we recently studied 89.31% use the DIV tag and 77.38% use the TABLE tag. On average, there were 41 DIV tags per page and 12 TABLE tags. The story here is that the TABLE tag is still going strong while the DIV tag is one of the most frequently used tag on today's Web sites.
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