Tables have become an integral part of all web pages, but there are still browsers and systems out there that have difficulty with lots of tables. How much do you use tables in your coding?

I'm a table junkie. What can I say? I prefer tables to frames anyday.

Well, that's definitely true. Frames are bad for many reasons, not least that search engines are notorious for linking to the page with the most content. I.e. the middle of your frame. So what most people are going to see is just a part of the page instead of the whole page. With tables you can control that - you're guaranteed that your visitors will see the whole thing.

I normally love tables but I've definitely found that an entire class of users run into trouble if you embed more than say 4 levels deep ...

but there are still browsers and systems out there that have difficulty with lots of tables.

I can't say I'm a table junkie, but I'd say that the majority of the browsers out there can deal with them, and every page on my site has at least one table on it. It's the only way to place things exactly where you want them on the page. To the browsers that can't read them, I say,'get over it, get a new browser.' I'd say tables are here to stay.

Personally, I hate frames. Properly used they can be nice within limits, but to me, they just cut down visible real estate.

Oh, right, I wasn't saying that the browsers couldn't deal with tables at all. Probably 99% of all browsers out there know what a table *is*. However, a good chunk of them have trouble with lots of tables inside other tables. So just one table is fine, or one table at a time. But if you have a table, and then a table inside that, and then a table inside that, by the time you get to the fourth table in, some browsers start to choke.

Yes that's quite true, Lisa. I had to do a triple nested table for one of my graphics courses at www.vu.org, and Netscape 4 decided it didn't like multiple nested tables with background graphics, and refused to display the background graphics in the innermost table! The URL is http://www.craftsnlace.co.uk/homework/paintshoppropotluck/backgroundhomework3.html - sorry it's rather long.

Netscape is useful for testing whether all your table tags are correct though because if one is missing or you have an extra one it won't display the table at all.

Sorry looking at that page I realise I forgot what actually happened - Netscape 4 refused to display the background colour of the innermost table, making it necessary to read the text on top of the flowers! Sorry about that.

Right, Netscape doesn't have some of the features that IE does, so a page that looks really good in IE sometimes looks only so-so in Netscape. But you're right, it's great for testing for broken links <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />