When the internet and web pages were first being developed, everything seemed to move at the speed of light.  New advancements and best practices came at a rapid pace without much oversight or homogeneity.  Until 1994, when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded, no web standards existed.  Despite their valiant efforts to make a standard that browser vendors would follow, many developers (specially Microsoft) decided they would still do things their own way.

One of the biggest problems that arose from this were tables. Originally, tables were used to display tabular data, which was just fine.  Then someone had the idea that since web pages are "grid-like" why couldn't we just use table elements to format them?

This was a monumentally flawed idea, although you couldn't have convinced many people at the time. Immediately things became messy: Files got longer and longer; hierarchical structures were really tough to understand; and if you considered modifying a website's layout you had to change about half the code.

Things limped along for a few years this way until Microsoft (with IE6) had about a 90% share of the browser market in 2002 and 2003.  Many developers began to tire of writing tables (remember all of the tr td tr td tr td?) and began to start making sites without tables.  They took the W3C elements and began to develop web pages that did not use tables.

Immediately they realized that the number one browser did not have full support of CSS!  Microsoft only provided "partial support of CSS level 1, DOM level 1", which provided some problems for developers.  In plain language partial support meant that Microsoft kind of introduced some support for something called CSS that we "think" has something to do with websites, but don't blame us if it doesn't work.

So, developers were back to writing table based websites simply because if people couldn't look at them properly, why bother?  Some adventurous code heads created some compatible tableless layouts, but this was extremely difficult and required many work arounds.  The good news is that two of the world's largest search engines Google and YouTube (owned by Google) have dropped their support of IE6.

With the advent of Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome (which I am using to write this post), Microsoft is rapidly losing market share.  Developers everywhere are rejoicing in the news that they can now develop websites that comply with standards easily with tight, clear, and semantically meaningful markup.

If you don't know what this means or you are still clinging to the old tables check out these images:

These lines of code do the same thing, but the shorter one doesn't use tables.  Seems like a no brainer to us…but what about you?  Do you still love the tables or are you a 3C convert?