Quote:
Originally Posted by baddog
I had to stop reading after the first few smug responses. In case no one has explained it yet, in a nutshell, CSS cuts back on the amount of code (html) required on your page. Not only should it increase your speed, but it lets the search engines see more of your text as it isn't spending all its time dwelling on your code.
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To go even further on what Baddog brings up, it's not only that the spiders are crawling your site faster that's a benefit, but a properly marked up page uses the code the way it's meant to be used and the spider will see that. For exampe, a h1 tag needs to be used accordingly. It's the top level heading tag. So you want your most important info to be in a h1 tag. I love seeing sites that will have the name of their site in a p tag but style it to be extra big and bold (like a h1 tag).
Use paragraph tags when marking up... you got it, paragraphs of text. Lists are used all over the place, you might not see it right away, but lists are everywhere... navigation is a really common list now.
As far as load times, well it's not a whole huge difference at first, and it won't be much faster if it's a one page site...like a gallery (some exceptions to the rule of course). But CSS gets cached. So if you use a single style sheet for a whole paysite tour, or members area, then once the CSS is loaded the first time, it doesn't have to load again. This makes going from page to page, in a well marked up page, faster.
Also, just because a page is marked up table-less-ly (is that a word?) doesn't mean it will cut down the code all that much. I see tons of pages where people just basically replace tables with divs and call it a day. That's not the best way to do it. And there is a time to use tables. They do have a proper use. It's just not for presentation.
Another fun thing is when people will mark up their pages table-less-ly but then not have a doc type, or use the wrong doc type, or not use valid html / css or all of the above. Why take the time to do all that work if your pages aren't valid?
Ok... I will end my rant here.