Following standards is generally a good thing.
The web today is a mishmash of technologies and clearly, following web standards has a lot of benefits.<p>However I'm beginning to think that using HTML tables for layout is a grey area. Certainly search engines don't seem to care too much about it (with respect to page ranking). They have been having to deal with tables for layout since they many of them started. I therefore don't think there is any evidence that you will be ranked badly from using them. Am I wrong?<p>Also there are many high ranking sites which use tables such as Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com (http://www.useit.com/). Admittedly this site is old, but it has a Google Page Rank of 8/10?<p>Also many pay-per-click search engine marketing (SEM) sites use tables for layout.
Such as the ones created by Chance Barnett. (I'll mention the sites but I am in no way affiliated with them, I heard about them through Mixergy.com, anyway: DoubleYourDating, CatchHimAndKeepHim, HaveTheRelationshipYouWant, LoveIsInTheStars).<p>So my question is what sort of advantage do these sites have over pure standards driven sites? Especially as many of them still have external CSS files.<p>I saw this article a while back on hacker news and it did have some good points: http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html<p>I don't want to use tables, but if the advantage is speed maybe we should consider it?<p>Anyway I would be interested in your thoughts from a technical perspective.<p>Many thanks.
Ben Emson...