Comment by [email protected]: @vincent.case: It's not clear precisely what you're referring to when you reference the "gwt layout widgets". Are you referring to the new *LayoutPanel structures or the existing panels such as DockPanel, Horizontal/VerticalPanel and such? The existing panels derived from CellPanel are all based on tables, which we know to be problematic under some circumstances.
The newer *LayoutPanel classes do not use tables, are much more predictable in their behavior, and fully support standards-mode doctypes, unlike the older table-based panels. If you want to use common CSS layout techniques involving tricks like float:left, explicit large margins, and so forth, there's nothing stopping you from using regular widgets in FlowPanels and HTMLPanels and applying whatever CSS trickery you like. UiBinder actually makes this much easier by making it simple to use HTMLPanel and mix arbitrary HTML and widgets. For more information: http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/UiBinder -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
