David Siegel had a great idea. He wanted to find a better way to layout
his web pages. Tables he thought! They're arranged in a grid pattern
and I can just plug my content in each cell!
And now we're paying the price for it.
Back in 1996, CSS wasn't around and using tables for layout was the only method available. A year later, David himself regrets what he created. Tables are not deprecated and tables have their place for displaying tabular data, just like a spreadsheet would, but tables have no business doing web page layout and you should not even bother to learn to do it that way.
Despite anything you may have heard, or any troubles you may have, CSS is the proper and only way to layout web pages. It is more flexible,
it makes your HTML easier to read and understand, it downloads faster,
it's reusable, it works better with javascript and the DOM, it has more
options, and I think you are getting the point now.
Some would say
tables for layout is stupid and I agree. The same advice for creating web pages is true for CSS. Always use a modern browser to test your design; Firefox, Opera, Safari. Every so often look at IE to see if it is cooperating. IE is the only browser that could possibly cause you problems but those problems are known as are the fixes.
