Organize Data with tables

Along with chucking, it’s important to take advantage of the various means of
formatting available with HTML. HTML tables offer some rich features for organizing
data. Add Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to the mix for style and you can
come up with terrific tables for your information that also break up the monotony
of too much text by adding color and space.
Tables have a stormy history on the Web. They were introduced to HTML as a
means for scientists and researchers to adequately manage tabular data. Prior
to tables, the only way to accomplish columnar layouts was to use preformed
text and painstakingly figure out how many spaces belonged between each
entry.
Later, tables became the grid system upon which most Web sites through the 1990s
and into the early part of this century were built. However, using tables for layout
has many significant problems, so a move to CSS for layout has become the popular
cry. Despite the unpopularity of tables, they are still wonderful and necessary to
do exactly what they were developed to do: organize content.
Some of the content you can successfully input into well-designed tables includes
the following:
Financial information. Many companies and organizations (especially
banks) use tables to display financial data .
Calendar-based information. Tables are a natural choice to design a
calendar layout for the Web .