Why do Google and Twitter use table layout? [dupli

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Does it make sense to use the <table> tag on a “modern” website?

Everywhere I go I see don't use table layout, it's evil, even Google says that, so why one of the most visited websites, Google and Twitter, use it for their homepage?

I don't think it is any kind of mistake, or any other stupid problem.

The only reason I can think of is, that they want the page to look similar even if client doesn't support CSS, like with Lynx.

So why everyone say it is so bad, if the biggest websites on the internet use it.

In my opinion, there are some cases, like those mentioned above, where it is vitaly important to have the same look everywhere, than it is OK to use tables.

edit: The same question goes about html elements like <center>, or formatting text with attribute align and other "html attributes and elements used to substitute CSS functionality"

Answer 1

Yep, agreed. Sometimes, just sometimes tables are just fine. Not everyone is writing websites that are targeted at every possible browser, that needs to support text to speech etc. In general, try to learn and grow your skills and use CSS positioning etc, but nothing bad will happen if someone uses a table to position things on a webpage.

Maybe this question should be community wiki, though?

Answer 2

Browser Support - These guys need to have their websites render perfectly on ALL web browsers (New, Old and Obscure). No matter who's using their websites and what OS/Browser their using, these websites need to work.

Each web browser supports it's own implementation of CSS and this causes a similar issue to that of the JavaScript DOM support in various browsers.

Page Load Time - Also their pages are optimized for Page load times. If it takes a user too long to load the page they'll just go somewhere else. There are still plenty of users without broadband, even a lot of mobile devices don't have very fast connections depending on where you are.

Answer 3

Three main reasons:

1. Tables are mainly bad for search engine reasons (there's also the issue of them messing up the DOM a bit, but that's not too bad). People don't search for Google on search engines, and people don't search for Twitter posts on generally either.
2. Tables render consistently on nearly every browser, including smartphones (which is a big concern for Twitter especially).
3. Tables consume less bandwidth. Both sites have immense data loads and need every bit of speed they can get.