Quick website-wide updates
Out of all of the reasons contained within this article regarding why to choose CSS over tables, our favorite is the ability to be able to make quick, website-wide updates within an external CSS style sheet. Though we've touched base on this a few times throughout the article, (3. Redesigns are more efficient), this is often times one of the biggest selling points of CSS and therefore deserves a bit more attention.
Do you value your time? If you're like us, then the answer to that question is "Yes, of course I value my time". So, if you value your time, why would you want to open and edit every single document that contains the element which you want to update within your website (i.e. the header)? Unless you have a fetish for opening multiple website documents, this probably isn't something you want or like to do.
Enter CSS.
Feel like changing the font family, font color, font size, line height, bullet-image, and letter-spacing of every single list element contained within your website? No problem. Simply open your external CSS file (the style sheet attached to all of the pages within your website - aka "universal style sheet"), find the "li" (list) selector, and add, edit, or delete properties with whatever values you so choose. Save the changes, upload the file, and Bam! - every single list instance (li) will be styled with the latest attributes defined in the external style sheet. Try doing that with tables.
Or what if you decide that you want to change the font family for all h1, h2, and h3 tags on your website? Imagine trying to use find and replace to accomplish this task with table-based layouts. Although this could be done, it will take a heck of a lot longer than by simply editing the h1, h2, and h3 selectors within your web site's universal style sheet. Website-wide updates don't get much easier than with CSS.