Table-less layouts are way too hard
There are many good things about table-less layouts are like if a sight-impaired person uses a screen reader to "view" your page, it might actually make a bit of sense. The only problem is they're so damn hard to create.
The layout I wanted for the body of this page was to have fixed width columns at the left and right for links and such, and two equal exanding width columns in the middle for content. Achieving this with DIV's + CSS seems to be pretty much impossible. I spent around 4 hours floating, nesting, absoluting and then relativing DIV's last night trying to make them do what I wanted. In the end I deleted them all and slapped a table back in. It literally took me less than 2 minutes to get the page structured the way I want. CSS-based layout should be as easy - why on earth should it be so hard (or impossible as the case may be) to achieve such a simple layout?
In Java there are layout managers. You define a layout, then you place your GUI elements into that layout. Perhaps CSS should be left as a styling language, and W3C should define a layout language that actually works.
