Might I add two cents?
My thoughts on this issue are probably reasonably well known.
But a slightly different angle.
I've recently been undertaking some serious research into current
practices by major companies, government departments, and so on when
it comes to web development. I'm in the processing of surveying well
over a hundred sites.
Some related lessons.
Table based layouts are still very very common.
So are malfomed documents. Unclosed elements, missing end tags,
missing start start, overlapping elements, containment rules broken.
You name it.
And the location of the overwhelming percentage of these
malformations is in and around tables.
So the use of tables appears to be associated strongly with invalid
documents (and not only through poorly formed documents, but also
through the use of invalid attributes associated with td and tr
elements).
In short, using tables is a very good way of raising the risk of
invalid documents.
BTW, I'm presenting these findings at WE05, and hope to have a
detailed article online soon,
john
John Allsopp
style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master
support forum :: http://support.westciv.com
blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher
Web Essentials web development conference http://we05.com
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