Your tables suck – get a life, or better CSS
Sample of CSS tables
Okay, HTML tables have been around since the beginning of time… they probably hung around with the dinos back in those days too.
Many a design for both the front and backend (especially the backend!) really looks crappy. I know some CSS evangelists who say everything should be table-less but I beg to defer. After all, tabular data should remain as exactly that – in tables!
Anyhow, I was browsing for resources to improve our table design here at Integricity, and thought of sharing it with the world. Here are some links to gorgeous table resources.
- Smashing Magazine – Top 10 CSS table designs
- Jeff Howden – Most of the CSS-only, table-less forms available suck
- icant.co.uk – Don’t want to waste time? Just copy from a list of several dozen beautiful table designs
There you have it – you can have awesome tables… now drop those ugly border=1 designs and grab these now. It’ll blow your clients out of the water.
James November 13, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Tables do suck for layout, except for a few rare tasks like columns or centering or aligning things. In those edge cases, CSS falls flat on its face. Sure, anything can be done with CSS, but there is no rhyme or reason in the CSS code for many really simple concepts.
I know what will happen if I delete a td tag – but why does deleting overflow:hidden on one element cause some completely unrelated element to change colors? Who knows – it’s magic!