Why is the use of tables considered poor practice?
[Edit]: And what then is the most optimal method to use instead of tables?
[Edit]: And what then is the most optimal method to use instead of tables?
Tables are similar to a club (caveman-style), it performs best at a particular task, such as knocking-off dinos, but it was quite often used as a hammer, paper-weight, table-leg, etc. Once specific and readily available tools came about, the club's value as a club didn't diminish, just its extended usability did.
CSS provided programmers the ability to not use a club as a wrench, but there will always remain a value for tables until something more efficient and effective comes about for the task that they serve.
There are still scenarios when you need them though, so I wouldn't call them 'poor practice' so much as something that should only be used if it makes sense.
[Edit] Added to my original post.
But like I said, I don't think tables are 'bad'. I think the main stigma against tables was that back in the old days they were used to layout pages that had column layouts, but I didn't program back then so I don't really know.
Tables for tabular data are the only reason you should use the <table> element.
GMail uses a table for laying out emails, is that tabular? (Maybe it is, I don't know, which is why I'm asking.)
What if you have an element which has 5 children that are in a row and you want the one in the middle to take up all the remaining width while the rest just take the width they need? I'm actually curious because I haven't figured it out. (Besides using table cells that is)
A list of emails can be thought of as tabular data. In Gmail, you have columns (selection, star, important, participants, subject, and date) with one row per email. That's a table without explicit headers.
Yeah, with current css specs in browsers you need to resort to table-cell stylings like display:table-row and display:table-cell. But that can be done without using actual <table> elements.
I should have qualified that I rarely use the table tag and use display:table-cell.
I was thinking of them as effectively the same as using a table for layout.