 CSS vs table based layouts
sh1mmer: There are lots of ways to define quality. The problem is how much measure people put in them. Guilt or coolness can be a good driver and so they are often used instead of reasons based on quality. One of the other commenters pointed out that guilt seems to be your motive.There are a number of reasons not to use tables. The main 2 are maintenance cost and accessibility.Maintenance cost the main point here is by separating the visual styling from the data you have much greater control over redesigning, changing the way the data is displayed, etc.Accessibility since many people who use the web can't see they listen to their web pages. This means the source order of the site matters. If you create tables that don't linearise then the information becomes out of context and difficult for these users to understand. Using CSS it's possible to create a source order which makes sense but display a different visual order.My recommendation for a way to do this is to use a grid system like YUI Grids. Like many other parts of development rolling all your CSS from scratch doesn't make sense any more. There are plenty of libraries which take care of the hard problems for you. My favorite CSS library for this is the YUI Grids library. (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids) It has tons of documentation and examples to get started with. I use it for all my work and personal projects.You might also consider the YUI Reset, Fonts and Base CSS libraries which reset default CSS styles across browsers, standardises the fonts and sets back a common default styling across all browsers respectively.Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo!