[thelist] arguments pro css & xhtml / con tables

[Robert O'Rourke]

Ian Anderson wrote:
> While supporting the use of CSS layout over tables, I'm sorry to have to 
> contradict you; your comment above is incorrect. There are generally no 
> significant accessibility problems resulting from the use of tables. It 
> really isn't something to worry about. Use CSS for other reasons.
>   
Fair enough (I went a bit far with that comment) but as I understood it 
some aspects of accessibility were to do having the correct source order 
e.g. content first, sidebars, navigation etc... last. Most articles I've 
looked at that advocate CSS layouts also go over the importance of 
having well semantically structured documents (based on user 
experiences) and I thought this couldn't be achieved using tables.

I don't know how a screen-reader would go through a table based layout 
but if it reads the html top to bottom then some might be waiting a 
while to get to what they want, on every page. Personally I would find 
this frustrating. Please correct me if i'm wrong again.