myHYP

In my research, I collated (with the help of Veerle's blog) some articles on CSS-based design VS HTML table tag-based design.

• Periodically Tabling on The Daily WTF – a good bad example of using CSS *sigh*
• CSS vs Tables on Veerle's blog – she takes a very pragmatic stand on the whole thing but concludes her likings for the much "cleaner way" of layout design
• Why tables for layout is stupid on Seybold Seminars? – I guess the take is quite obvious here
• Did CSS really kill the tables? on Markus Dresch's Multiverse – another sensible pragmatic approach to the issue
• Gasp! Tables! on mezzoblue – another article that basically says: it depends
• An Objective Look at Table Based vs. CSS Based Design on Andy Budd – probably the best written one among the listed here

Thinking of it, my first web page (in 1996?) had blinking GIFs as well hehe. The second attempt, which was lost when Geocities was bought over by Yahoo, used frames instead of tables for layout. I guess web designers back then were just hacking away with the structural tags HTML provided us with. And these principles stuck and it doesn't seem so wrong to use tables to design layout. I got so good at using tables for layout, I think I nested up to 5 or 7 table tags in a single page before. The only time I used div tags was when I wanted something floating on the viewport.
Anyway, I have to agree that presentation markups and semantic markups should be separate and with that, (in the more general case) using tables as a layout markup would just be – how to say – a hack. But i guess in design, what we have aren't really rules or laws, its principles and guidelines. You embrace it if you choose to do so.