CSS - the end of tables and the future of the web

The disoriented author is a developer and not a designer. In recent consulting gigs I have run across more and more people who advocate a fully Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) based design. That is a design that uses no tables. This blog is built on MovableType's hosted blogging service TypePad.

Typepad is a a CSS based shop. The only tables on this site are the tables that I have introduced. I am currently working on a Java blog using Apache Beehive technology. One of the goals I set for myself was to use a completely standards based all CSS solution with no tables.

My web experience is all table based and my personal site, dchung.com is heavily table-based. So to enter this brave new world, I went out and purchased two of Eric Meyer's books on CSS: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, More Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices that Matter).

The problem is that the more I experiment with CSS the less convinced I am that is an all encompassing solution.

My early experiments were based on trying to reproduce the design of dchung.com. The process started well enough. I found I was able to add some features and clean up the look of the site. Until that is, I started to deal with columns.

I want a layout with fixed width left and right columns and a dynamically re-sizable center column. I also want to build full width header/menu and a full width foooter. I thought that CSS would make this simple and browser independent. Instead I found that to get this layout I needed to use a hack. This hack involves using the voice-family CSS attribute.

So even when I used the hack, I tested it in Mozilla Firefox and it worked but in IE, Opera the results were inconsistent. So here, for the first time, I appeal to my readers for advice. Why should I give up a table-based layout that works in all current browsers for a set of CSS hacks that do not work in all browsers.

Some CSS advocates have suggested fixed-width layouts as a solution. That would be a helpful if I wanted a fixed width layout.

At this point I am leaning towards a solution using tables as the top-level layout device and increasing the use of styles for the rest of the site. My introductory foray into CSS has led me to believe that a pure CSS solution is not yet ready for prime time.

Help me out here, am I missing something.