I’m wondering what the best approach to doing layout in the template designer is since I’m experiencing issues placing elements on the page, Selecting elements inside of div containers or tables has been easier for sure, but which to use? Should tables be employed or div’s? Placing a new div after an existing one is tricky as well, so is there any method to doing that?
The answer to your question could be either short or long. Here is a short attempt to guide you. In general, email will require table as most email client today support limited subset of html css and no javascript. Note that our default template do use table. There is tremendous explanation on the blog of Blog - Litmus.
For print you need to use table for transactional data as they are tabular in nature and this is what we are capable of breaking. Using a div is possible but not that it will challenge the page breaking mechanism of Connect. They should be used carefully except on master page where they can easily position content at an absolute position.
For web page, most web designer have switched from table designed web page to div one. I believe also with the recent focus on ‘mobile first’ / responsive design div have become a necessity.
In that regard we will recommend the use of responsive framework like zurb foundation (used by our wizard template) or twitter bootstrap. These will extensively use div.
Note though that tabular data are better displayed in a table inside those div with the disadvantage that table are not responsive (or difficult at best).
The long answer to this question (for web design and email) can be found by googling table vs div.
Hope this help.
Answer by: Didier