User blog:BBilge/This site really needs: semantic markup

It has long been established that tables for layout is stupid. The famous seminar given at Seybold, San Francisco in 2003 paved the way for a better web by condemning the, as then, ubiquitous use of tables for layout by dubbing them "stupid". They were right. Their recommendation was to create "semantic markup" that is more accessible, flexible and functional. Tables should only be used to display tabular data as they were originally intended; never to position page elements.

Yet even now in 2011, when almost every other major site has adopted this approach, League of Legends Wiki still uses tables for layout extensively. Excessive use of in-line styles also undermine accessibility and consistency across the site. For this reason the main page and many others are a nightmare to maintain and suffer gross visual inconsistency between different pages and browsers.

Tables shouldn't be used for layout. Style information should be migrated to corresponding CSS documents instead of dumped into pages or injected into templates. The rest of the web has already caught up. Why are we still eight years behind?

We can fix it.