Tableless web design or tableless web layout is a web design and development method that does not use HTML tables for page layout control purposes. The term “tableless design” denotes the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position HTML elements on the web page.

The development of CSS improves the separation between design (CSS) and structure (HTML) and move back towards a semantic organization of web content which considerably improves web accessibility to users operating a wide variety of devices. The created separation makes it possible to have different layouts for different devices and to have a specific style sheet for the printable version of the web page.

In the full CSS tableless layout, all information regarding the layout virtually resides in the CSS document making it centralized for changes to be made quickly and globally by default. Moreover, because the layout information is stored externally to the HTML, it is easy to make additional new web content or web page as well as to modify an existing web page.

Tableless layout produces web pages with fewer HTML tags if implemented cleverly. This reduces page download times for subsequent pages using the same resources. Tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. A number of HTML coders utilize CSS to manipulate tables frequently.