Are tables depreciated?

[MrApples]

Have tables been depreciated by divs? Divs are faster, allow more control, and should be able to do anything a table can (or so I've been told), so is it true?

This is off of other's opinions... I myself have not been able to get divs to work as solid as tables.

[SEOvB]

Each serve their own purpose still.

Some people blow it way out of proportion like using tables is some horrible idea and the page won't display right or whatever And some are just total fanatics that pages have to be all CSS now and thats really not the case.

Use tables if you want as some people find them easier, or use Div's if you want. Its all pretty much personal preference.

[cheesegrits]

Well the Big Deal people like to argue about is using HTML tables as a way of formatting the page structure, which is a Bad Thing. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that it's inflexible and hard to re-style. But It's always OK to use HTML tables for truly tabular data within a page.

So vB's standard templates are definitely "wrong" in that they use tables to lay out the page itself. But that's easy enough to change with a little but of hacking on the standard "shell" templates.

The grey area is whether things like lists of forums, or posts in a forum, are really "tabular data" (and hence fair game for an HTML table), or whether they are really part of the page layout (and hence should be CSS). And changing vB's multitude of table based displays is a major undertaking.

My personal opinion is that Jelsoft should be working hard towards offering a choice of table based or CSS based default styles as soon as possible. Once you understand just how powerful CSS is, it's really a no brainer. Having a totally CSS driven vB style would make style modification incredibly easy and powerful. It really is mind blowing what can be done with fairly simple stylesheet changes, with no template mods required.

Just my $0.02.

-- hugh

[Dismounted]

Any refresh of the default vBulletin style will come with the release of 4.0. And if it doesn't come then, it's not going to come soon. :)

[cheesegrits]

Sure, I don't expect it to happen in 3.x. It's definitely a non-trivial task! But IMHO if it isn't in the Top 3 list of essential changes for 4.0, then Jelsoft need to be re-evaluating their priorities.

If they really want to move vB out of the purely "forum" space and establish itself as a fully featured "community" app, with social networking, blogging, heavy weight profiles, etc. they are going to have to do something about the look and feel. Without moving to CSS driven styling, it's always going to be a clunky, inflexible, hard to restyle forum app with some stuff bolted on to it.

This isn't a religious opinion. I'm not one of the "Give me CSS or give me death!" brigade. I'm just a realist who loves vB and wants to see it move with the times.

-- hugh

[ssslippy]

After much frustration with divs and tables. Each to its own. Ill say divs ability to throw content anywhere is fantastic and all but it has its limitations. I personally find content easier to organize with a table. However divs are less code and are faster.

[briansol]

tables are for tabular data. they aren't deprecated. they've just bee used improperly since Netscape communicator was the hot browser.

Kier has said that 4.0 will be more standards compliant and semantic code base.