It CAN be done, but it really is still a pain. I’m like Donald (though not as badass for sure) and try to be pretty strict, and I really really try not to use tables in my own work but sometimes you gotta. Email is another place where you just HAVE to use tables to be sure the presentation is solid for all browsers.

Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely best practices out there that will allow precise layout control within a div-based environment. (100% height is the bugbear of standards-based design, but there are ways.) There are no tables in our new site for Berkeley Law, for example (preview: http://berkeleylaw.babywhale.net/).

The real problem is that this level of standards-compliance is hard to maintain when people use a variety of tools to maintain their sites. We’re moving toward an official position on this: the full-on div-based standards-obsessed buildout can only be executed in very constrained, autocratic authoring environments. If anyone’s using Dreamweaver to edit their site— which we fully support in situations where it’s already working— fancy div columns probably aren’t sustainable.

(There will probably be a Part 3 to this topic on the blog. Hell, there will probably be a Part 8.)

At this point, we use a table at the top .Master page level (.NET environment) to get a basic column structure, then resort to divs withing the columns.

Our alternative approach has been to create fixed-height divs for rows, then float “column” divs left within the row. This is really unpalatable since the row div isn’t smart enough to change it’s height to contain the columnar children.

Let’s get Donald to name his uppity CSS Druids, so we can force them to lay out the clean, simple, best practices which give us the control we need without having to resort to tables. If they can’t provide this answer, we should hang them…

Good luck with the blog.