To emphasize greater use of Cascading Style Sheets — there are few very good reasons to dump endless HTML table structures in favour of CSS. Tableless design (or layout) is a design technique that leaves out HTML tables and uses CSS to arrange elements on a web page. Bandwidth & rendering Tableless design means less bandwidth. If you link in a CSS file, a browser will cache it on 1st load of a page and on further navigation only page structure itself is being downloaded. In addition to traffic cuts it significantly reduces page latency as well. Accessibility Prioritizing Cascading Style Sheets will also ease the process of porting a site to various platforms, e.g. mobile phones, handhelds, etc. or usage, e.g. printing. Not to mention making the site reachable for a screen reader or braille device. Maintenance With CSS site layout is kept apart from its structure and is centralized. That makes site design a lot easier to change. For example changing 1 single digit in CSS may increase or decrease font size of an headline on each and every page of a site. CSS is a reusable resource as opposed to the inline definitions of HTML. And for all tableless developers there are badges you can add to a site to indicate its quality.
Nice guide, highlights all of the areas why you would use tableless coding. And, for all the new coders, it's obviously recommended to learn this method and not even bother with tables too much.
Plus table designs were just a temp means of getting images to align properly. They were hacks with tons of code which was repeated. What a relief for CSS.
I agree due to information overload theres loads of articles out there that teach table layouts to the newbie, and along with Dreamweaver many people get the wrong idea. I suppose it's luck if the newbie stumbles on Div based layouts or table based layouts among there first web adventures!