I was reading about the Web Design in general and came across an interview with Rob Weychert in designinterviews.com. Here he talked about various issues Web/Graphic design as any other web designer. But the best part of this interview is the section where he explained about the significance of CSS design and why it is so popular. There is nothing new he said, but the noticeable thing is how simply he explained it. It’s really a great read for those who wants to have the basics right!

“Why do think CSS design is becoming so popular among web designers when tables are just as easy?”

It has less to do with what’s easy than it has to do with what’s appropriate. The web standards movement, which has championed the use of CSS, encourages designers and developers to keep structure (XHTML), presentation (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript) separate. The primary reason for this is to maintain the purely structural nature of the HTML markup, which was never intended to be a design tool.

The benefits of coding this way are numerous. For one thing, using CSS for layout instead of tables is much more efficient. A single CSS file can control the look of an entire site, whereas using tables for layout requires an excess of repetitive, superfluous code. This not only increases a site’s collective file size exponentially, it makes it a lot more work to maintain. Even more important than making things easier for yourself, though, is making things easier for your site’s users, and web standards have that angle covered as well. For instance, when it’s not cluttered by unnecessary presentational code like font tags and misused tables, properly semantic HTML is much more easily understood by search engines, mobile devices, and assistive technologies used by disabled people.