A brief explanation of the reasonable application of table and div in page design

At the beginning of this article, I would like to correct the mistakes in an introductory article I wrote before. I would like to quote the more official statement first to avoid misleading the novices again.

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration must be placed on the first line of an HTML5 document, before the <html> tag. This tag tells the browser which HTML specification the document uses.

The doctype declaration is not an HTML tag; it is an instruction that tells the browser which version of the markup to use to write the page.

It is very important to specify a doctype in all HTML documents so that the browser knows what type of document to expect.

The doctype in HTML 4.01 requires a reference to a DTD because HTML 4.01 is based on SGML. HTML 5 is not based on SGML, so it does not need to reference DTD, but it needs doctype to regulate the behavior of browsers (so that browsers can run in the way they should).

In HTML 4.01 there were three different document types, in HTML 5 there is only one:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

Because the HTML5 tag for declaring document types is backward compatible, even if your HTML does not use HTML5 tags, you can still use this declaration method. However, there will be some incompatibilities in the page, which you will need to correct based on the actual situation. <!doctype html> allows the browser to render the page in strict mode (standards mode) without specifying a type dtd.

Let's get into today's main topic: the reasonable application of table and div

Tables were widely used in early page design, but with the development of the Internet, tables were gradually abandoned. Now, only a small number of old websites on the Internet (there are many famous ones that do not need to be changed) still use tables to layout pages. Now new websites basically use div+css to layout pages, but many friends who are new to web front-end will have an illusion that tables will make the page unfriendly to search engines, so they always use tags such as dt and ul when designing lists. This will make you spend a lot of time designing the page style, but the actual effect on search engine optimization is very weak.

A major disadvantage of using a large number of tables is that it is not friendly to search engines, and it is also very unfriendly to programmers. A large number of nested tables will make people dizzy. But if used with div, it will provide an effect, and the effect achieved may be better than dt and ul.

Another problem is that a large number of table tr td will make the semantics of your page very poor. We will not discuss the semantics of tags here. You can go to Baidu to search. Search engines like pages with good semantics. Here I will introduce a website with good semantics: https://www.jb51.net/w3school/ You can also do it yourself. Use Google Chrome to remove its CSS link, and then look at its page layout. You will find that all its titles and lists are in order, just like the very formal typesetting when writing a paper. Even if you don't need a style sheet, I believe that everyone will not feel very disgusted. However, some websites are different. After removing the CSS style file, the page will collapse directly. Here is another site www.webgamei.com. Remove its CSS style files (2). Look at the page again, because many of its styles are directly written into the style in the table, it doesn't seem to have changed much, but if you look at the navigation part, you will find that the page has no sense of semantics. If the styles of the page are separated, then removing the CSS file will probably make it unreadable.

So here is a suggestion, after you design your page, you can write out the default style layout directly without adding CSS style, and then add CSS custom style according to the page. Wouldn’t this be more efficient? Haha, I haven’t tried it, I just think so.

There is a lot of content about semantics, so I won’t say too much here. I would like to recommend a very good book, “Writing High-Quality Code - The Way to Practice Web Front-End Development”, which gives a very clear introduction to semantics. Page layout is a process of accumulating experience. When you see a good website, you can learn from its page layout. When you see a bad one, you can also think about how to optimize it, so that you can grow faster on the road of web front-end.

If there are any incomplete details, please correct me, thank you.

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