The issue is accessibility and valid XHTML. It is a common idea that
having a site that uses table is not accessible or valid. This however
is not true, you can make a page with as many tables as you want and it
will pass both W3C validity and accessibility tests. The question of
tables is a suggestion rather than a strict standard:
“It has been advocated many times that tables shouldn’t be use
in
HTML for layout purposes” (http://www.w3.org/2002/03/csslayout-howto)
Obviously, just because the standards only suggest not using tables for
layout, does not mean that we should ignore it. A designer’s goal
should always be to design their site to standards. An example of this
not happening and tables and spacer gifs being used for layout was
Disney UK’s recent redesign, notice carefully that the google summary
thought the website was “about” spacer images. www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/general-joomla/what-makes-a-good-designer.html
To return to Joomla, a design is Dependant on the designer. To make a
rough estimate of web designers in general, I would say that 80-90% are
still using multiple tables and spacer images to achieve their layout.
Even “big name” web sites are doing this, as seen in the above example.
So, its designers that make Joomla templates (the files that controls
presentation), so it would be safe to assume that the same percentage
are using the same technique.
Enter advanced CSS. This complicated tool allows the designer, and thus
Joomla to produce layouts that don’t use tables for layout. Through
various settings within the CMS, its possible to get the number of
tables being used down to 2-3. For example:
http://demotemplates.joomlashack.com/simplicity/ (use firefox developer
toolbar: outline tables). Compare that to a site that really *is* using
tables for layout like http://www.cnn.com/ (about 14 by my count)
A lot of fuss is made about these last few tables, and I would argue
that it is a red herring. If your text is fully resizable for people
with poor vision, and your site can be navigated with no javascript,
and you don’t use flash for navigation either, and your site loads fast
for people with dialup, and you have used alt titles for all your
images, and your pages cane be adjusted for different widths, and your
content is source ordered. If you have achieved all these (which our
designs do), THEN you can worry about those last few tables. Until
then, all of these factors are far bigger blocks to universal
accessibility.
The other side of the coin is CSS is certainly not perfect. These
sophisticated CSS layouts are especially fragile, and easily break. One
of the gentleman on the thread that Corey pointed out touted this site
as table free:
http://www.24ix.de/
Unfortunately once the browser expands beyond about 1300px, the right
column starts to overlap the footer. Great for accessibility, bad for
the 99%+ of viewers that are not using a screen reader.
Again to summarize, I really don’t think that completely
tableless=accessibility. With all these things, it is a situation of
shades of gray rather than black and white.
I wrote a longer articles about this issue here:
http://www.compassdesigns.net/resources/articles/usabilityaccessibilityw3cseo/