Duncan,
You do need to get your head around this or you remain trapped in the old mindset, which mixes content and appearance.
A table, unless it holds tabular data, has no semantic meaning. Especially if you are using nested components. You are including it in your HTML only for the purpose of holding together your design, and this is not a defensible approach, even if it "works".
The point of a table-less design is to remove the "appearance" code of a website from the HTML, and to give meaning to everything that remains. Divide the HTML into 'boxes' that are named according to their function (header, navigation, sub-navigation, main content etc), then control the position and contents of each of those boxes with CSS.
And the point of doing this is to ensure that the HTML can be repurposed for different devices (print, braille, handheld, etc) without having to be rewritten. That's the vision, anyway.
Neerav and others have posted some inspirational links demonstrating the power of "pure" CSS to create some extraordinary layouts.
-Hugh Todd
Thing I have trouble getting my head round is the term "table-less layout".
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