HTML & XHTML: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)

The table element and its associated elements have become the most commonly used means of creating Web page layouts using HTML/XHTML markup. Although positioning through style sheets (see Chapter 10) should provide more precise layout capacities , browser support is still somewhat inconsistent, there is often an issue of backward compatibility, and developers and Web design tools still do not embrace CSS fully. For better or worse , for many developers tables are still the best way to create layouts that work across multiple browsers, especially when considering older browsers. Even if tables lose their layout duties , they are very useful; remember, they are meant to present tabular data.