We are living in a transitional time. CSS gives a lot of possibilities to compliant browsers, but CSS support by the most used browser on earth (no names here) is still bad. So what to do?

I'd say it depends. If you can convince your customer to liquid design, go for pure CSS. This means to abandon a lot of conceptions about how a website should behave on different viewing systems: adaptability is needed, and this wreaks havoc on "standard" designs. All-out liquid designs can be as attractive as their "fixed" brothers, but they require different thinking from ground up.

If your customer *demands* a pixel-perfect solution, go for a simple table to anchor the parts of your design and fine-tune with CSS. This type of print-oriented design cannot be done - or if, only with comparably high costs - with today's browser support for CSS (did I mention the one browser that ...? Ok. )

There should be no dogmas - in this world of imperfect CSS support many solutions have to be compromises. Who is to say which compromise is better?

As long as you don't use that million-nested-table design of stone-age HTML, it is okay. There are no 'illegal' tables.

On the other side, creating a "DIV soup" is no real improvement ...

Perhaps the decision should be based on simplicity.


Just my thoughts,
Alex