To div or not to div

this is the new table When I was learning web design back in the day, using tables was common practice. Sure there was this thing called Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) but it was definitely easier to design using tables, and inline styles. That was until xhtml became popular and we designers had to say bye bye to good ol’ html.

Come to think of it, we just added the letter “x” to html and all of a sudden, my table founded layouts became deprecated and using divs and CSS suddenly became a must (the ‘x’ by the way stands for extensible). I even recall using divs only when I wanted to simulate an iframe effect within my layouts, but now, entire websites are built on it, it’s really funny how one letter could affect so many things in the world wide web (kind of makes you wish it’s the same with life eh?).

So, why and why not use div?
Here is my personal opinion:

it’s spider friendly – web crawlers, not the creepy ones
it’s css friendly – it does not encourage use of inline styles like tables
it’s easier to maintain – if all my styles are in one place and not all over the page
it’s more human to read – allows for a more readable markup (developers love this)

why not:

the learning curve is steeper than that of learning tables
need to have a good grasp of css
some styles look weird in a wysiwyg editor but display correctly in browsers
cross browser compatibility with css can be a real pain

There are actually a ton of reasons why and why not, but then again, it all boils down to the current standards of the web – which says < tables> are out and divs are in.