No tables here, the question is; to Slice or not to slice?

Most visitors to a website will leave after 8 seconds if the page has not loaded. To keep load times quick, a total page size should be no more than 100KB. Slicing images helps to accomplish this by breaking an image into sections for optimization. For example, saving an image as a .jpg file may get the file size down where it needs to be, but text and solid areas of the image may not look nearly as well as if they were in .gif format. Slicing allows the best of both formats to combine for a smaller file size. The debate is still on whether slicing actually creates faster loading times or not. I say the decision is definitely a case by case scenario, not set as a hard and fast rule.

Tables should not be used for web layouts or to contain sliced images because they are semantically incorrect and are not nearly as flexible as DIVS. As a designer who used to design web pages before CSS came along to save the day, I can attest to the fact that it allows for a much more flexible, current looking website. Tables allow way less flexibility in layout, but still have a place in web design and are best utilized when presenting tabular data.

Additional information can be found at these sites:

• Sue Chastain shares a wealth of knowledge about image slicing, optimization and other creative web design issues: graphicsoft
• Very creative work-arounds for slicing images and positioning them on a page without using tables OR DIVs. Also contains solutions and work-arounds for many other web design issues: tjkdesign.com
• This site contains lots of useful web design info, including an article on when and how to use tables, and some code to make tables look better than I ever thought they could!webdesignfromscratch.com
• There is a very valid counter arguement at this site for NOT slicing images: Against slicing

Judy Vitale 11/09/09

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