Why DIVs are Better than Tables

I struggle with the “DIV vs Table” argument myself. Most web developers, with CSS experience, will agree that DIVs (or other styled elements) are better than tables for site layout, and I agree. Where I generally struggle, however, is when it concerns tabular data. I generally think tables are easier but in a recent project I found a darn good reason to use a DIV instead.

Think about this scenario. You need to create a table for a list of products. You are creating this for a site where you have a general idea of the width of columns to use, but you're not sure how many columns. It could be 2, 3, or even 4. Now, a list of products could certainly be considered tabular data. Do you put the list in a table and write some programming to figure out where to break the table up, or do you use DIVs. At first, I thought, lets use DIVs and float them left, then write some programming to throw in “clear: left” as needed between rows.

What I realized, shortly, was that I didn't need “clear: left” if I used DIVs. If you wrap your DIVs in another container DIV, they will wrap automatically! This is probably obvious to some, but for whatever reason I never considered it.

As a side note, my data is probably not really tabular in nature, since I was putting more than a single piece of text in each “cell”. But, maybe I'll consider DIVs more frequently now.

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why_divs_are_better_than_tables.txt · Last modified: 2020/06/01 22:53 (external edit)