Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Standards Vs. Sensible Design (19 Jul 2004) Using Web standards is the right thing to do, but, as with any recommendation, there's no point following them off a cliff. New developers tend to over-react and take things a little too seriously. There is nothing evil about using a table for tabular data, for example. Many's the time I've seen newbie Web standards champions turn shyly to mailing lists to ask how they can turn something into CSS, as 'tables are outdated.' In response, helpful people point to examples that were intended to show what CSS could do, rather than identify what makes logical sense. A good rule of thumb: if you have a bunch of data that's connected to one or more categories, use a table! Article URL: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/standards-sensible-design Read 77 more articles from SitePoint sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy