Is Table-less web design the preferred route when designing a website ?

Actually tableless has many advantages over tables. With proper CSS the style can be changed instantly and quickly. So CSS is a better and more flexible option.

See this for how.

http://www.w3.org/2002/03/csslayout-howto

and one other really good one.

http://davespicks.com/essays/notables.html

one of the note here

"Using CSS for layout, you can present the data in a logical order and use CSS to control the appearance."

which makes alot of sense to me. It means you can put "columns" into any order setting the importance of the column easily. And have ONE appear totally different with just a slight CSS change.

Good Luck, once you know how, it is easy and better.

The modern design stylistic depracates (ie doesn't recommend) tables in HTML. Theoretically you can do most of what a table does using CSS.

I think its would be smarter to develop new web pages using CSS rather than tables, but don't give up on tables altogether.

I do think its unreasonable of the client to demand you rewrite using CSS, if they didn't explicitly specify CSS initially, well unless they are going to pay for it)

The benefits of CSS are supposed to be easier to change, easy to deploy on different devices (you change the CSS tag definitions not the actual code). It sepearates the content from the presentation, so in a large development team different tasks can be allocated to different people, so web design is split into speciofic responsibilities and more team working can be used.

at the end of the day the visual result is the same.. as you point out, however some indexing engines handle css better than tables, there is a possibility that in the future table may be dropped or may be changed in other ways.

MInd you if you are used to using tabels faking a table in CSS is a pig, Ive found the devlopment tools are patchy, error trapping is a pig... In fact to me CSS seems to be a useless diktat foisted on devlopers by people obsessed with 'elegance' of design rather than practicality

If the website isn't being deployed on numerous different devices (eg computers, Web TV, Phoens etc....) then CSS is of dubious value

If the website isn't being developed by a team then CSS is of dubious value

There are however tricks you can do in CSS which getaway from having buttons which are grey and flat, you can make your design more colourfull, you can make it more modular. You can get away from nasty tricks such as frames. It has advantages, but like many a development technique in the systems and especially web work its often oversold by zealots

Agree with the points above. But Tables arn't all bad for newsletters, infact they are a must because some email clients strip out css which would cause the entire layout to mess up if it were divs - but this is only for newsletters.

It can be a bit cumbersome designing a site in divs rather than tables but it is worth it, you reduce a lot of code for a start and search engines can index your site much more easily.

Also, your code will be symantic - meaning that everything that is used in your code is being used for the correct purpose. ie. Tables are for tabular data (and in some cases forms too) .... and not to be used for conventional layout.

The more you practice designing web pages using <divs> and css the easier it will get - plus such attributes are highly employable!

NEVER use tables when developing unless you are literally making a data table.

it's better to do it using CSS, it'smore reliable and efficient.