(HTML) Learning Tables - isn't this out of date?

Question

Having just completed the HTML course I was surprised by the amount of information and tests on html tables.

I have learnt web design via the most up to date sources that I can find and almost everywhere explained that Tables and TR / TD tags were the old school formats to design pages and they are unused today? Is this content still relevant?

The same question goes for floats and clear

I would like to hear your opinion :)

Answer 1

HTML is supposed to be semantic, that means the tags you are using should describe the content they contain.

So using tables is not only not bad, but even correct, if you want to display tabular data!
For example, a table where the rows are cities, the columns are years, and the cells are electricity usage.

But you are right, using tables to layout a full website is bad, exactly because of semantics! It's not what tables were meant to be used for, but in the old days webdesigners didn't have many options.

I think the main usecase of float was meant to be for paragraphs of text to flow around an image, like in a textbook. But webdesigners abused it for many other things aswell. I usually avoid it.

Answer 2

Visit the official website of w3c and read official Documentation https://www.w3.org