Tables design is the web design which uses HTML tables to design a page layout and control processes.

Instead of tables then emerged a new style sheet language CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets).

These languages or to e specific this language was then used to arrange page elements and text on the web page.

Introduction to CSS:
World Wide Web Consortium introduced CSS language which was used to improve accessibility to web and to make the HTML code more semantic than presentational.

Advent of CSS:
when CSS web design was introduced many web developers found it much easier to use. They considered the formatting through CSS very simple, infact they considered the tag to be obsolete in reference to table’s web design. Earlier CSS had very limited and difficult to use layout capabilities but now the times have changed and now CSS ahs improved a lot with many common page layouts especially its 3-column design.

Since 2006 CSS has improved significantly but still there are certain websites which use tables for layout and CSS for text formatting only.

Tables vs. CSS:
– Accessibility: the layouts in tables are actually better over CSS because if you want to open your PDF files in your mobile phones then it becomes necessary that they are accessible and tables allow them to be accessible on mobiles also.

– Implementation: clever implementation of tableless design is able to produce web pages with less of HTML tags which will allow the user to download pages easily from the web.

– When it comes to tableless designs then if any changes are to be made, it is then easier in your CSS design to change them rather than changing in table’s web design. This is infact a difficult task.

– It happens that in some browsers CSS does not get full support and hence the downloading can be incomplete. This happens especially in the case of NETSCAPE 4 software, where CSS downloading is a problem.

Article Source: