These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to develop sites that will degrade effectively--that is that they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, T.V.s--and will work correctly on devices that dont even exist yet as long as they are standards compliant.

Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered what the heck is going on here? You see lots of opening and closing of tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site http://www.vp3media.com and then look at the source code of this site that uses a tables based layout: http://webservices.org/. Big difference, huh?

If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the amount of bandwdth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesnt have to load all of the code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmiting less data.

CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you have a tables based business site that relys on Internet traffic to turn a profit or aquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.