The advantages brought about by using CSS instead of tables include the following:
- The structural organization of X-Cart’s pages has been improved. This is good for SEO, because web
crawlers now find relevant content in the source code of X-Cart’s pages more easily.
- With the presentational items placed separately in CSS files, X-Cart’s pages have become smaller.
This means that your server experiences less load, the page content is downloaded faster and uses
less bandwidth.
- The main content of pages is now placed at the top of the source code. This causes the information like osCommerce Templates
to display first, leaving the presentational elements to load at the end. This way the main content of
the page is immediately visible to the user; the user does not have to wait for an entire table with
content and graphics to load as it happened with table based layout.
- The appearance of the storefront can now be changed significantly by editing the styles in CSS files
(skin1/main*.css).
At present, X-Cart’s layout is based on the ‘Light & Lucid’ visual scheme. The rest of X-Cart’s
traditional layouts (3-columns, 2-columns, small shop), color schemes and dingbat sets have been
removed.