Amen. This is one of those pedantries that has outlived its justification.

Look: can tables be misused? Yes. Have they been? Yes. Does a static HTML file filled with tables for layout obscure the semantics for things like screen-readers? Sure.

Does any of that have anything to do with whether or not a table should be used for layout? Not that I can see. Two or three lines of jQuery will pack those divs into your table by class.

The weirdest part of all of this is the idea that CSS is "just as good" for typical layout tasks. Not only is it not as good, it's a near-disaster. Nothing works right, ever. It's never possible to just say "line these elements up and put these others to their side" without jumping through awful hoops. Seriously: look at the "layout" CSS for any serious site and it's almost unreadable.

GUI developers have understood this for two decades now, and universally settled on the table as the appropriate layout mechanism. Why the web should somehow be different just baffles me.

Again, I find myself agreeing with you :-) People seem to think that if you create CSS based layouts, that they can be repositioned and re-done using only CSS. This is simply incorrect, and anyone with sufficient html experience knows this.

If you want to change the layout of any site, you need access to both the html and the CSS, so trying to separate the two is just overkill. Sure, you'll want to use CSS for colors and fonts, but for page flow, CSS isn't powerful enough by itself.

You should tell that to the guys over at CSSZenGarden... they'll get a good chuckle.

The CSSZenGarden is - as mentioned in the article - a special case because the content never changes. This means that some of the flexibility issues with CSS is not a problem. You can design everything with fixed sizes and positioning. Every single paragraph is assigned a unique id which you can address.

This approach will never work on "real" web site, because content on a real web site changes.

Whether or not the content is static or dynamic is kind of a moot point, all things considered. <div style="define-my-location"><?php ?></div>

No. That is the main point of the article. Pure-CSS layout is only fine if you know the exact dimensions of the text when creating the layout. If the textual content change later you run into problems.

That is why tables fare better in "the real world" even if proof-of-concepts like zen-garden seem to demonstrate that CSS is powerful enough.

In the case of your example, if you truly have a label that resides beside an input box that could hypothetically be as long as a sentence... then you've done more wrong in your content structuring, than you have with your code. :)

As far as your column example is concerned, you made two content areas dependent on each other when that relationship may change overtime too, however with tables... you must recode the entire site structure to adapt to that.

I disagree with you... and I'd like to think I have "sufficient" HTML experience but as you didn't define what that is, I could be wrong.

A couple of years ago, I ran a styleswitcher on my blog giving the visitor about 5 layouts to choose from. Each one visually different from the rest, not one of them needing any changes to the HTML. The content changed on a daily basis (every time I wrote an entry) and yet it still managed to fulfil its purpose.

Sure, it was only a blog and not a commercial website, but it still shows that CSS is capable of changing the layout by itself. Perhaps sufficient CSS experience is the key?

I absolutely love Flex's layout system and it's not table based.