Is there a business reason for striving for pure CSS layout?

Question

It seems like every time I try to create a pure CSS layout it takes me much longer than if I\'d use a table or two. Getting three columns to be equal lengths with different amou

Answer 1

The main reason why we changed our web pages to DIV/CSS based layout was the delay in rendering table based pages.

We have a public web site, with most of its users base is in countries like India, where the internet bandwidth is still an issue (its getting improved day by day, but still not on par). In such circumstances, when we used table based layout, users had to stare at a blank page for considerably long time. Then the entire page will get displayed as a whole in a tick. By converting our pages to DIV, we managed to bring some contents to the browser almost instantly as users entered to our web site, and those contents where enough to get the users engaged till browser downloads entire contents of the page.

The major flaw with table based implementation is that, the browser we will show the content of the table only after it downloads the entire html for that table. The issue will blow out when we have a main table which wraps the entire content of the page, and when we have lots of nested tables. For the 'flexible tables' (those without any fixed width), after downloading entire table tag, browser has to parse till the last row of the table to find out the width of each columns, then has to parse it again for displaying the content. Till all these happens users has to stare at a blank screen, then everything will come to screen in a tick.