I'll quote Garri's post from a different thread:
The stylegala.com page looks very nice in Linux:Garri wrote:Tables have been bastardised over the years to handle presentation and combined with transparent image files it adds weight to your sites, but not good weight, bloated weight.
But this was back in days of lack of web standards, the rapid adoption of which is enhancing user experience, there's no doubt about that.
Still someway to go before things really settle down.
I would be interested to see how many of the sites in CSS Zen Garden look on Linux. I might be retiring one of my Windoze machines here, so will load it with Linux.
I would also be interested in how stylegala.com looks on Linux, it looks beautiful in OSX.
And most of the sites in the CSS Zen Garden look nice too, but some of them (most noticeably the Red Stars style) have some major overlap problems.
My point is just: tables are a no-brainer way of making sure that everything on your site will show up where you want it to. If I have my page written using tables, I can be sure that my menus won't overlap my top banner image, and I know that two of my text paragraphs won't bleed into one another. Maybe they weren't originally intended to do presentation, but they do a brilliant job at it nonetheless.
I know this can be achieved with CSS as well, but I just think there are so many ways to do it wrong with CSS, and I'm not convinced that it's totally cross-platform either in the way that tables are, at least not without hours and hours of frustrating fine-tuning.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to switch over to using CSS for positioning. I'm just not convinced that if I do so, it'll work on every browser that tables will work on with the minimal amount of time that tables require. My site uses tables for layout, and I'm certain that it will position things where I want them in any browser, including Lynx and IE and essentially everything in between that allows tables at all.
I also think (though I don't have evidence here) that image optimization and code optimization are more important for page load times than tables vs. css. So I'm not at all swayed by that argument.
Someone please convince me! Why shouldn't we use Tables anymore? Aren't they still useful and functional?