Should I be using tables

quinnd6

Ok I'm building an online shop for someone so I was wondering are tables a good or bad way to go about it.
At the moment I have a table with the product image, name, description and price in different columns.
The table looks a bit plain at the moment so am looking at styling it properly but am now wondering if using tables may be a bad idea.
Maybe it's not the kind of data I should have in a table.
Should I just be using css without tables to format it instead or are tables what should be used here or does it matter?
I don't really know because it's the first time I've built a site for someone.

seamus

Tables are certainly the easiest way to get things to line up the way you want, but in the modern world of different devices and different needs, their lack of flexibility means they're very outdated for displaying anything except a table of data.

If this for an actual online shop and not a project or something, then don't bother writing it yourself, you're wasting your time. There are hundreds of free solutions that will do it better in 30 minutes than you could write in five years. http://www.x-cart.com/ for example.

Buford T Justice

If you're still thinking of doing it yourself, then why not consider using something like bootstrap with divs instead of table rows and columns. It'd be more responsive than a standard table

Creamy Goodness

Are you displaying tabular data? if yes, then go ahead.

Otherwise no.

quinnd6

I don't know if that kind of data fits a table to be honest.
The kind of data as I said above is products in an online shop.
Anyway I have a lot of the php done already for the online shop and it displays contents of mysql tables which have all the product data ie. photo, name, description, price.
I don't have any paypal functionality added to the site yet at the moment you can only view the products and at the moment they're in a standard html table which looks kinda crap.
I want to change it to make the page look better so I'm not sure whether to scrap the tables and use css divs.
I don't know much about xcart.
Can you plug it into an existing website?
I'll look at those suggestions you gave me.

Hollister11

Only use tables for data eg premier league table. Their outdated, not responsive and search engines can't read tables.

smcelhinney

Hollister11 wrote: »

..search engines can't read tables.

That's incorrect.

Indexers will "penalise" for using tables in place of semantically structured markup, but they will still read them and discern context from them.

tricky D

smcelhinney wrote: »

Indexers will "penalise" for using tables in place of semantically structured markup, but they will still read them and discern context from them.

It's not so much that indexers penalise, it's more that you penalise yourself with less semantic weight relatively speaking. There are also other issues re accessibility/screen readers.

The only time tables should be used for layout is for email newsletter shots due to the overall bad quality of email rendering. However with the rise of devices these ideally need to be responsive tables, which is another can of worms.