The Return of Table-Based Layout (Well, Sort Of)

How to build “table based” layouts with CSS Level 2
No quirks or tricks and it’s all standard compliant. Developers need free time, and now they can have it.

How many of you have lost countless hours while developing the perfect layout for your websites? How many have lost in fact money because of the extra time needed to complete a job! How many of you “have gone crazy” because of Internet Explorer and it’s incompatibility with standards based markup. Well, all of you need to have a quick break and celebrate. All those days will soon be over.

Developers, meet tables. Now please don’t get mad on me, because you’re not being taken back to table based layouts that standards advocates have told you not to use for your layout. I am not talking about HTML tables that are a semantic structure, I am here about pure css tables. Yes, you heard me well. If years ago you used , ,

and similar tags to structure your sites, you will now continue to use divs. But instead of using the faux columns technique or the one described in the holy grail, you will be using something that is much more simple and that thanks to IE 8 now works exactly the same on all modern browsers.