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Using Tables as a Layout Tool

When you think of a table, you probably picture something that provides a nicely organized view of data in rows and columns, like the one on color names and their hexadecimal values a few pages ago. You can use tables in Web pages to do the same thing, and that's what HTML table tags were originally intended for. But it turns out that where HTML tables really shine is in providing visual organization to a Web page. They make it vastly easier to line up multiple elements in a visually appealing way by making it possible to divvy up the screen into neat sections-in particular, columns.

Why would you want to do this? Let's say, for example, you've decided that you'd like to have your navigation buttons down the left side of the screen, running parallel to the main content. Getting the buttons to line up neatly and evenly while having your text come out in the right place is a real challenge. But if you use a table to divide your page into two columns-a small one for the navigation buttons and a larger one for the content-you can simply stack the buttons in the first column and put everything else in the second column. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about inadvertently messing up one column while working on the other.

If you look closely at the Cheap Web Tricks home page you can see that it's designed with three columns: a smaller one on each side, and a large column with the majority of the content in the center. Organizing a page with so many components without using a table would be a real challenge, but with a table, it's easy.

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