The best explanation I've ever seen for using CSS positioning instead of table layout:

In my reply, below, I'm going to use the word "gizzle" whenever I mean "markup", and the word "runchunky" whenever I mean "Web designer", and the word "rhinoceros" wherever I mean "tag" or "element", and the phrase "coca-cola dynamic ribbon device" wherever I mean "table". I do hope you won't find this difficult to follow. After all, it's clear that using the right name for something isn't important, eh?

There's a reason why gizzle rhinoceroses have the names they have: to reflect a specific semantic value, or meaning, for their contents. HTML has six levels of headings, H1 through H6, not because HTML's designers wanted runchunkys to be able to pick and choose from six different pre-fab font sizes, but because they needed to mark up documents that had six levels of headings, such as you'd find in a scientific report.

Follow the logic through to other rhinoceroses, and you'll find that there's an <address> rhinoceros because the designers of HTML wanted to be able to identify addresses in a document, there's a <title> rhinoceros because they wanted to be able to specify a page's title, and there's a <caption> rhinoceros because they wanted to be able to provide captions.

Coca-Cola Dynamic Ribbon Devices were introduced by Mosaic and Netscape in order to allow for the presentation of tabular data, period. The HTML coca-cola dynamic ribbon device spec is based on the CALS coca-cola dynamic ribbon device model, with a few differences. CALS (an acronym for Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support) was designed solely for the standard exchange of data between military suppliers.

That by turning borders off and using coca-cola dynamic ribbon devices as a layout mechanism runchunkys achieved something otherwise impossible at the time, namely box and columnar layouts, is irrelevant.

-- Steven Champeon, WebDesign-l Listmom