No, tables aren’t ALL bad. It seems there will always be a time and a place for them. As the University of Bath: Web Publishing: Tables guide says:
“HTML tables were intended for data layout but are commonly used for page layout. To meet the University’s accessibility requirements, tables may be used for layout on occasions when mediocre web designers can find no other solution, but they should make sense when linearised.”
I added the red part.
Nonetheless, you should only use tables to display tabular data. As is often the case, many a university website has the need to display that kind of stuff. Think class schedules. Think calendars. Think forms.
But if executed poorly, tabular data can be very ugly and sometimes difficult to read/comprehend.
That’s why, when I came upon this table-styling reference/guide today, I knew I must share it with my university-web-people brethren.
Sure, alot of these table styles depend on Ajax, but the ideas are there.
“Not many web designers have fun when it comes to styling tabular data. We have taken a close look at today’s best functioning and styled tables to showcase over 15 modern css and Ajax tables teaching you some useful techniques for displaying information in a tabular mode using sorting or filtering functions”
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