Spans are Evil

Spans are Evil: "Are you still using tables for page layout? If you use an authoring tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver, a very good tool by the way, you can easily fall into a trap. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to lay out a page using a feature called 'layout view'. When you use layout view, you simply use the mouse to 'draw' tables on the page. It allows a huge amount of flexibility in designing your page and allows you to place elements wherever you want them.

So what's wrong with that? The problem is in the code written by Dreamweaver to accomplish that task. Dreamweaver's layout view makes abundant use of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN attributes to split and merge table cells to format the page exactly the way you have drawn it. However, when you begin adding content to the page, you may find that your carefully crafted layout begins to explode. "