A Call For a New HTML Element
Working as a web developer you focus on two main things, quality and accessibility. Quality is a fairly obvious concept but accessibility is the beast that few manage to tame, the werewolf without a silver bullet if you will. One of the pills some developers refuse to follow is that tables are not accessible.
True, the use of tables doesn't essentially breach priority 1 or 2 (provided you have a table summary) but screen-readers do have quite a holiday attempting to provide the user with a coherant browsing experience. Therein lies the problem that I have highlighted.
Overusing Markup
Web design has gone from one extreme to the other in the search for accessible design, and now markup is more abundant than George Bush-isms. Table-based web builds are more friendly for new developers because it is often easy to separate designs out into a tabular format, with distinct rows allowing for very simple layout manipulation. Many things are a lot easier in table builds: vertical alignments are straightforward and item positioning perfect through the use of nested tables etc. I.e. to get text to perfectly align to an image, the text is placed in one column, the corresponding image in another.
Because tables are a big "no-no" as far as accessible design is concerned (unless when used specifically for tabular data), web developers are finding themselves overusing markup - using divs to recreate how you would build the site using tables. Surely, this is entirely redundant?
A New Solution?
It seems obscene to not be using the most effective tool for a job; instead overcomplicating the design and build process (especially for full width, tabular layout sites). Maybe this is the reason the BBC still use tables for their website?
The solution seems to present itself, and yet, is still missing from the web development scene: either, an adaptation of the table element - offering more than a table summary to assist screen readers, but a modified tab-index-indicating that the screen-reader should go from cell 1, to cell 2, to cell 3 in a user defined way - rather than following the physical layout.
Table v2.0 / Grid
As stated above, a modification/advancement of the table element could help a new age of web development. CSS3 may excite some developers, but personally, I find bringing tables back from the brink of mis-use/death would be a far better prospect.
If you feel the same as I do, let me know by emailing me steven.york@seopher.com, forward this article to friends, write your own article on the subject, develop something - it doesn't really matter. It just seems obscene to not use the best tool for the job when it could be perfect with a minor adjustment.
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