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Tables and accessibility, your opinions....

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From: Ben Dykes
Date: Oct 1, 2005 7:20AM

Hi there,



I'm relatively new to the list so apologies if this has been debated before!
:-) But...



I'm of the general opinion that truly accessible web sites should not use
tables anywhere especially for layout, however an exception could be to use
[correctly marked up] tables for displaying data (and only data) such as
calendars.



For a site with static content the above rule is easy to implement with CSS,
however I'm finding very few dynamic sites that do not use tables somewhere
for layout. Of course the W3C guidelines are only guidelines and open to
interpretation so what constitutes "data" and "layout" could be open to
debate. Is a list of products REALY "data" and does it need to be displayed
in a table? It's easy to use CSS and lists to display such info.



So I think my first question is this: how do others in the industry feel
about the use of layout tables? Is there a commonly held belief that all
layout tables are bad or that are "some" ok if marked correctly?



My second question relates to server side scripting and my example of a
product list. While its easy to display product information using CSS it may
not be so easy to manipulate that information using some dynamic techniques
without tables, in fact many of the DataBinding and manipulation techniques
in asp.net positively require tables.



So which scripting language do people prefer when building accessible and
dynamic sites that use as few layout tables as possible? Is that even
possible?



Thanks for your insights!



Regards



Ben