Question

A DNN module consisted of a few forms in which text fields, labels and date pickers were arranged using ‘tr’ and ‘td’ html tags. Later on, I was told to convert these tables into unordered lists, ‘ul’ and ‘li’ Will doing so improve the UI rendering experience drastically?

I’ve read the following document carefully but still have doubts: Tables vs. Unordered Lists.

Answer 1

It sounds to me as if you are laying out a form (‘text fields, labels and date pickers’), in which case you might be better using DIV, P, SPAN and LABEL tags to organize your controls, not TABLE tags or Lists.

As Oded says, it’s not going to impact UI rendering much, but Tables are best kept for tabular data, and I would add that Lists, ordered or unordered, are best kept for, well, data in a list 🙂

If you are laying out form controls, I think this discussion may be more relevant to your decision: http://css-discuss.incutio.com/wiki/Tables_Vs_Divs

At the risk of really starting a debate, my preferred layout for a line in an Asp.Net form is something like this:

<p class="form-line"> <!-- You could as well use a <div> -->
    <label>Field Name:</label>
    <asp:YOUR_CONTROL_HERE/>
    <asp:YOUR_VALIDATION_CONTROL_HERE/>
</p>