Actualy is it so wrong to use table (like we're not supposed to) in a profesionnal css design? They do great in every browser from ie 6 to opera and they don't nead clear:both or other tricks.
I miss designing with tables... And I just don't do anymore because I was told not to, for maybe no good reasons.
Ceasing to adopt standards, best practices and support users who are disabled because "the old way seems to work better" is a terrible way to advance technology.
Well, I have done things with HTML which make folks cringe who don't understand why I am doing it.
Imagine a web page with a giant table, every other row of which contains another table, and where the entire page contains probably 20000 INPUT tags, half of which are potentially exposed to the user under one set of visibility rules or another.
Now if it wasn't a bulk payment interface for wiring money out to hundreds of clients, paying potentially up to 5000 invoices in a single run, it would be entirely insane. As it is, the insanity is mostly an issue of the fact we have to do a lot to handle the fact that we have to handle concurrency issues over application protocols like HTTP, which leads to fun stuff in the database.
Using semantic HTML and CSS to design pages is certainly not a "hip" technology. It's use case and benefits, while not perfect[1] are well understood and proven. It's not a "broken" use case, like using tables for layout are.
I miss designing with tables... And I just don't do anymore because I was told not to, for maybe no good reasons.