Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook (Pioneering Series)

There is absolutely no reason not to use a table for marking up tabular data. But wait, what is tabular data? Here are just a few examples:

• Calendars

• Spreadsheets

• Charts

• Schedules

For these examples and many others, it would take some severe CSS acrobatics to mark the data up to appear visually like a table. You could imagine trying to float and position all of the items with crafty CSS rules, only to end up with frustratingly inconsistent results. Not to mention that accurately reading the data without CSS would be nightmarish. The fact is, we shouldn't be afraid of tables—and we should use them for what they were designed for.