Table-Based Layouts (The Next Big Thing) in CSS

I just got finished reading an article that got pushed out in the Sitepoint Times by Kevin Yank that was titled, “Table-Based Layout Is the Next Big Thing”.  It was a good read that discussed how the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is finally going to offer support for CSS Tables.  This should be exciting.  Here’s a link to the article I found in their Tech Times.

For me coming up as an old-school developer, before CSS was a household name in the developer community, embracing CSS for doing anything other than formatting fonts on a page has been a struggle.  Not only is it more time consuming, it also has been of little importance to browser manufacturers until recently.  I am glad to see it is making some headway, it’s the efforts of folks like the sitepoint blogger’s, the list apart guys, and a few others that have kept the issue of compatibility relevant.

In the article Kevin hit the nail right on the head with this comment:

The lengths to which designers must go to produce, say, a simple three-column layout using CSS techniques are so extreme that many web designers simply give up on CSS and resort to HTML tables for their layout. The Tech Times #142 and #143 were devoted to this issue.

This is dead on in my opinion, or at least most of the developers I know that have been in the business for a while fall into this before mentioned category.  With the release of IE8 we are at least going to have another option for layouts as well as something that Kevin didn’t mention and that is how we turn out tabular data from a database, which is something else I have struggled with in the past.  This should be an awesome improvement.

If you haven’t already I suggest reading the article, it’s pretty good.  Here’s the link again…